Inside SEAL Team Six(11)

After school and weekends, I worked various different jobs—pumping gas, washing cars. One of my most memorable jobs was at a place called Raymond’s Turkey Farm on Hampstead Street. They hired me even though I was underage because I was willing to do the nastiest job they had, which was working in the cellar and preparing the turkeys for the slaughter.

I was fourteen or fifteen years old and experiencing something that was like a scene out of the horror movie Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Or worse.

In the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving and Christmas, I’d work day and night, sometimes fifteen hours at a time, up to my knees in blood. My job was to reach down, grab the turkeys by their feet, and hang them on these racks. Then an old guy with an electric knife cut their heads off.

Next, these ladies put some kind of vacuum cleaner down their throats to suck their lungs out. These were dumped into big barrels that I had to clean out at the end of every shift. It was disgusting, and the smell was awful.

But I was young and making $1.65 an hour, which helped support my motorcycle habit. My parents wouldn’t let me go out on the weekends unless I came home with my paycheck and posted it on the refrigerator. That was for bail money, in case I was arrested.

Which happened often.

The guy who got me the job, Bobby, was two years older than me. He used to pick me up on the way to school and drive me home after school. And every time he left my house, he burned rubber, leaving behind tire tracks in our driveway and a cloud of smoke. He drove like a maniac, always over a hundred miles an hour—blasting “Hot Rocks” by the Stones from his eight-track and Jensen triaxial speakers. I don’t know how we survived, but somehow we did. Barely.

Between working, school, and training for motocross, I still managed to routinely get into trouble.

One of my best friends, Gary DeAngelis, was the mechanic for my bikes at the motocross races. He was a big, heavy guy with a thick black beard and long matted hair, and he was on probation to be a member of the Hells Angels. As part of his initiation, the whole chapter had urinated on him, and he wasn’t allowed to change his clothes or take a shower for a year.

One night, he and I and three or four other bikers went to a bar together; a fight broke out, and someone kicked a glass door in. I ran out because I was underage and didn’t want to get caught.

Instead of calling it a night, we rode to another bar, where we were all arrested. I was handcuffed to Gary for an entire weekend. Man, did he stink!

When I turned sixteen, in October of 1973, I finally got my license. Christmas Eve I borrowed my dad’s station wagon because I was going out to buy my girlfriend, Kim, a Christmas present. On the way to the mall, I stopped at her house and ran into her dad, who was a World War II veteran, and his best friend, Nicky, who was a member of the Hells Angels, the Lawrence, Massachusetts, chapter.

Nicky said, “Don, I heard you just turned sixteen. Come have a drink with us.”

“I’d better not.”

“Come on, man. Let’s celebrate. Don’t be a pussy.”

Nicky was one of the craziest, funniest people I’d ever met. I looked up to him as a role model of a sort.

I said, “Okay,” had some drinks with them, then got into my dad’s station wagon. While I was inside, a blizzard had blown in. The roads were slick, and visibility was terrible. But I still had to get a present for Kim.

Seeing a snowplow ahead of me, I decided it might be a good idea try to catch him.

I hit the gas hard, did a three-sixty, smashed into some trees, and ended up in a frozen swamp.

I’d just gotten my license and now I had wrecked my dad’s car.

Sitting in the frozen swamp waiting for the tow truck, I felt like the guy in the Albert King song—the one later recorded by Jimi Hendrix and by Cream: “If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all.”

I didn’t realize for a long time how lucky I was to have parents who loved me, despite everything, and to still be alive.





Chapter Three





Graduation, 1976


Don’t go ’round tonight.

Well, it’s bound to take your life.

There’s a bad moon on the rise.

—Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Bad Moon Rising”



It was the mid-1970s, and my friends and I were teenagers filled with wild, rebellious energy.

The mood in the country had turned dark and angry. Nobody trusted anyone. It was the tail end of the Vietnam War. President Nixon was in the White House trying to find his way out from under the debris of Watergate. Kids marched in the streets and burned the flag. Talk of revolution and repression filled the air.

My friends and I didn’t understand what was going on around us. Nor did we know what to believe in. All we knew was that the world our parents had helped create was coming apart.