The Bagman

Chapter 5
Johnny's Story

Chapter Description: In which we learn about Johnny's past.

The Bagman Chapter 5: Johnny’s Story.

Johnny’s childhood officially ended when he was four. Johnny could never forget that night. His father and mother had taken him to a restaurant called Mama Maria’s Italian Eatery. They went here almost every week, and so it was like a second playground to little Johnny. Just a year away from Kindergarten, Johnny was still very much the baby of his family, and his father and mother (ESPECIALLY his mother) spoiled him rotten.

Even though he could walk, talk, count to a hundred, write his name and even read some simple books, he was still kept in diapers. It wasn’t even that he lacked the prerequisites of potty training. He could tell the difference between wet and dry, slept dry through the night, and could hold his bladder and bowels when needed. It’s just that when most little boys his age would run to the bathroom, he’d wet his diaper and run to his mommy. Johnny had even used the potty from time to time when he was bored. His opinion surmounted to: “Tried it…didn’t care for it one way or the other.”

His mommy had said she enjoyed the bonding moments of changing his diaper, and he loved the attention she‘d heap on them during those special moments. “Just make sure he’s using the toilet while he’s in Kindergarten, and don’t start breast feeding him again,” his daddy said once on the matter.

His daddy didn’t seem to mind. If anything, his daddy was disinterested in the matter. Mommy did all the diaper changes, and it’s not like Daddy couldn’t afford the diapers. His Daddy could afford anything; money had literally no meaning in their lives. Daddy’s job was as a “leisure item, entertainment, and amenities provider”. Johnny didn’t know what that was, but it must have been the best job in the world.

Daddy explained it one time: He was constantly being asked for things, and presents that no one could get anywhere else, and it was Daddy’s job to get them for the people. Daddy was like Santa Clause, except his suit looked nicer. That was actually one of the things that they had in common. They both had a love of fine clothes.

From the moment he was able to talk, he expressed a desire to dress just like Daddy, and Daddy couldn’t help himself but to indulge him. So little 4 year old Johnny Spettro had an entire closet full of tiny custom tailored Armani suits to match his father. His mother declared it as “adorable“, and would often remark that she was so happy that she had two handsome men to take care of her.

She had said the same thing the night they had went out to Mama Maria‘s. As usual, it was a busy night for his father, and he was doing more talking than eating. People would come, ask Daddy for some kind of weird present like a “transvestite hooker”, (must be some kind of transformer that turned into a fishing pole), or a “couple bricks of cocaine”, (cocaine must be really good to build things with.) Coincidentally, Johnny was building a mansion out of blocks on the floor, underneath the dining table. He’d build things with his blocks, and occasionally pat Mommy’s leg to let her know he was still there and hadn‘t run away.

Johnny saw a pair of black pants legs approach the table, and heard a voice. It belonged to a man, but he didn’t sound as old or as big as Daddy. “Mezzanote,” he heard Daddy say, “what brings you here tonight?”

“I come with a message from Don Coglione, he wants to buy you out.” The strange new voice said. “He wants you to retire.”

“Retire?” Daddy asked. “Why and with what? All my money is invested and tied up with Zecchino‘s companies, same as Coglione‘s.” The table shook a little as Johnny heard something being placed on it.

“We expect you to retire with this,” Johnny heard some clickety clack sounds. “As for why? New guy in town, Leone, says he can undercut you by fifty percent. We’re gonna take that deal for all it’s worth.”

“We?” Daddy said. “You’re counting yourself among the big boys, now? You‘re just Coglione‘s errand boy.”

“The times are changing, Don Spettro,” the man in black said. “You can either change with them or get out of the way. WE want you out of the way. Quietly and painlessly if possible.” Johnny saw Daddy tapping his foot, he only did that when he was starting to get really mad. “This is a more than fair compensation for the years of business we’ve done, enough for anyone to retire in comfort and live out there days with their families.” Daddy’s foot was a woodpecker now. “Speaking of which, where’s your little boy?” Daddy’s foot stopped. Daddy’s knees went straight as he stood up at the table.

“You take your money and your bullshit retirement offer and tell that jerk Coglione, this flash in the pan Leone, and that chicken shit Zecchino “This is NOT how we do business”!” There was a pause. “Now get outta here before I have your balls cut off and surgically transplanted to a hooker that knows how to use them!”

There was a long pause. “As you wish, Don Spettro,” the man in black said before his feet walked out the door. The tablecloth came up, and Johnny saw his mommy’s face, checking up on him. She looked worried for a second and then smiled before going back to her dinner. Johnny kept playing with blocks.

That’s when Johnny noticed the puppy. Mommy and Daddy were busy eating dinner and talking. Daddy still seemed really mad about the man in black and Mommy was trying to calm him down. The puppy though, it was right by the kitchen and it looked like it wanted to play. Johnny had always wanted one, but his Mommy had never allowed him to have one.

Johnny crawled out from under the table, and went after the puppy. The puppy playfully ran away back into the kitchen. His diaper slightly crinkling as he ran, Johnny chased the puppy. The kitchen was very busy and none of the grown-up cooks seem to notice him or pay him any mind. They had cooking to do while Johnny was busy looking for his puppy friend.

Johnny heard a bark from outside and noticed that the backdoor was wide open. He ran out into the alley way, looking for his barking little buddy. A hand reached out of no where and grabbed little Johnny from behind. A dirty, greasy hand covered his mouth so that he couldn’t scream. Johnny looked up.

Johnny would never forget that face. The man’s face was boney like a skeleton. His hair was greasy and stringy, and it looked like. His eyes had a wild look to him and his yellow-toothed smile was not at all reassuring. “Hey there little Spettro,” he said looking down at Johnny, “looks like you found my puppy.” the man said gesturing to the puppy that Johnny had been chasing.

The man took a gun out of his pocket and pointed it at the puppy. “Good dog”, he said before pulling the trigger. Johnny screamed as the puppy gave out a final involuntary yelp. The man motioned to himself. “Mad Dog.” he said and then winked at Johnny.

Two chef’s ran out the backdoor. They were rewarded with a bullet in the chest. “Aaaaany minute now,” the scary man said, still holding Johnny close to him.

“Johnny? Johnny? Johhhhnnny!” Johnny heard his mother screaming from inside the restaurant. Footsteps loudly echoed from inside.

“Finally!” the scary man growled as he aimed his gun at the door. First Daddy came out, his hand in his pocket reaching for something.

BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! Daddy fell to the ground as bullets tore through his chest, splotches of red staining his suit. “Shoulda taken the buyout Spettro!” the scary man growled, still holding Johnny hostage. BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! Johnny heard his mother scream as she stepped out the door. Than a hail of bullets ripped through her body and she fell to the pavement like a puppet with its strings cut.

During this whole thing, the man was holding Johnny’s head still so he couldn’t look away. Johnny couldn’t bare to close his eyes. Instead he kept them wide awake as he watched his mommy and daddy die right in front of him.

A car pulled up and the window rolled down. Police sirens could be heard in the distance. “Giovanni! Let’s go!” The driver yelled, waving the scary man over to the car.

“Give me just a second!” the scary man called back. He pushed Johnny away and pointed the gun at Johnny‘s face. Johnny was looking straight down the barrel of the gun. Click. “Oh wouldn’t you know!” Giovanni said looking at the gun in disbelief. Then he shrugged. “Oh well, have a nice life kid!” Giovanni laughed as he ran to the car and hopped into the passenger seat. The vehicle peeled off into the darkness. Johnny just stood there, crying, as a the police came a few minutes later and found him by the dead bodies of his parents.

That was the last time Johnny ever had an accident in his pants. The next day he used the potty like a big boy. That may have been the end of Johnny’s childhood, but just the beginning of his life. Maybe it was the fact that he had been a Mafia Don’s son and this was the system’s revenge; maybe it was just bad luck; maybe the child welfare system is just that fucked up in New York. Johnny didn’t know. All Johnny did know is that for the next 12 years he was shuffled away from home to home, each one seemingly worse than the last.

At his first foster home, he learned that he wasn’t special, that he wasn’t center of the freakin’ universe. There were over a dozen kids, each with their own story and their own needs. Each had come there before him and seemed to know how to survive in the foster care system.

At his second foster home, he learned what it was like to go hungry, his foster parents used the kids as a justification for more money on themselves. At his third foster home he learned what it was like where bathing and sleeping in a bed were privileges that could be revoked if you didn‘t say the Lord‘s prayer at night or if you were seen having impure thoughts. At his fourth foster home he learned to take a beating.

In the school system he was classified as “Emotionally disturbed.” Fuck right he was emotionally disturbed! Why wouldn’t he be? But in a school system that has middle class values and wants to raise a generation of productive and non-confrontational children, emotions were bad things to be controlled at all times…unless it was a brief burst of excitement for getting an A on a test. Johnny was a liability to test scores.

The constant hopping around also made Johnny’s education very self directed. He had always been a grade level or two behind grade level, despite his natural aptitudes. Just as a teacher was starting to connect to Johnny and start to catch him up, it would be time for Johnny to be shuffled on to another district. So Johnny learned only what he had time for, and he only had time for what he was interested in.

Johnny learned to read at a functional level, but never developed critical thinking or empathy for characters. In general he had trouble emotionally connecting with anyone. He was good at math. At science and art, he excelled. He liked knowing how things worked, and his art was an outlet for him. At history, especially the talks of War and guns…he blanked out. History was just full of dead guys that best be forgotten.

Naturally, Johnny got into fights at school. Among other lessons, Johnny had learned from an early age that physical force was a means to an end, a powerful one at that. Johnny was never very physically strong specimen, but he was wiry and knew how to fight dirty. He never scrapped by the unwritten playground rules. Johnny always went for the groin, the eyes, and the throat- kicking, gouging and biting all the way. His various foster parents had indirectly taught him to go for pain and damage. As he got older, he was expelled from more than one school.

At sixteen, Johnny ran away from his latest home, and out into the streets. From there, he entered the prison system for charges of grand theft larceny, aggravated assault, resisting arrest, and assaulting a police officer. He was not tried as an adult.

Instead, this suddenly kinder and gentler justice system forced him to go to therapy and as part of his parole, required him to attend even after he turned 18. His psychiatrist said, among other things, that one of the reasons he had so many issues was that he needed to find closure. No shit, he needed closure! His parents had been killed right in front of him. But he wasn’t going to be getting it. The people who had killed his parents had gotten away with it.

There had been no trial, no investigation. A policeman hadn’t even taken a statement from little Johnny or asked him what he had seen. Instead he was quietly shipped off to the houses of abuse and neglect known as foster care. The system was broken. The system didn’t work; that’s why the Families ruled this town to begin with.

Then a miracle happened. Somehow, someway, he received an envelope from an anonymous source. It contained a huge check made out to “cash”, and pictures of the heads of the Five and locations of where the heads of the Five Families frequented. Including a picture of the man who killed his parents. He looked older, but Johnny could never forget that stubbled grease ball face. “Giovanni Canecattivo “ the picture said. “Use it well”, a piece of paper inside the envelope read.

Johnny didn’t know how the money had come to him, and didn’t care. The ball was in his court. He immediately cashed the check for the ridiculous sum of money. He spent it all almost instantly. Not on guns and explosives and weapons of revenge, but on fake ID’s, a new apartment under an assumed name, and buying some new friends that could keep secrets.

The rest of what he had was the result of thrifty living, careful planning, credit card scams and identity theft to pay for expenses. Johnny might not have questioned how he got the money or information, but if someone could just mail that to him, that meant they knew how to find him. So Johnny spent the better part of a year planning and taking himself off the grid. Nothing he owned or purchased was under his real name anymore, and he never bought anything that required a recurring payment plan…that he intended to pay anyways.

Now, at the age of 24, after years of abuse and redundant state mandated therapy, Johnny was making his move and it was coming off flawlessly. He had managed a stroke of brilliance by blowing up Mama Maria’s and Don Coglione who had ordered the hit. Blowing that place up provided some REAL closure.

Johnny wasn’t that bulky, so he had been able to scrunch into one of the Zecchino security guards trunks and let them take him to home base. Then he just smuggled some laughing gas into the vents in the dead of night and let the gas do its work to the security personnel.

A VERY drugged Zecchino had told Johnny the codes, and Johnny had made sure to transfer and conveniently “lose” the various funds of the Families and donate them to charities. Turns out an LSD and ecstasy cocktail in a room filled with laughing gas worked just about as well as truth serum. Johnny was tempted to give himself the money, but that could be too easily traced. Let the Families work out getting their money back from the Red Cross. Zecchino had enough valuables and money on his nightstand that could be pocketed to tide Johnny over for a while.

Then came Johnny’s move of hiding in the trunk of the police car and waiting till it was back in the city at a red light to bail out went off without a hitch. The dumb donut eaters had never even suspected. Hell, mob soldiers and thugs were used to driving around with bodies in the trunk, so they probably didn’t even notice the extra weight in the very back. What was the cops’ excuse?

Johnny made his way home after taking one of his practiced routes to avoid tracking. That included going into the subway to throw off any dogs or trackers. Taking several monotonous routes home, going to different lockers and changing clothes to throw off cameras, and finally going home .

Johnny walked into his apartment and locked the door behind him, all three locks. He breathed out, silently. He walked to his bedroom and began shedding clothes onto the floor, this was no time to be responsible. In fact, this was the exact opposite time.

Standing naked in his bedroom, Johnny reached into his top drawer and took out a disposable diaper. He held it in his hands and turned it over again and again, looking at it. It looked like a baby diaper, with childish cartoon designs on the front landing strips. He ordered it from a fetish site under an alias- some poor schmuck in Dallas was paying for his fetish.

He unfolded the diaper and laid it on his bed, a custom made adult crib that he had made based off of designs he had found on the internet. He grit his teeth and stared at the open diaper. He wanted it. He wanted this diaper on him and he wanted it bad. He needed it to feel good like a junkie needed a hit of heroin.

At the same time, he hesitated. He felt like less of a man; he felt like a freak. He felt guilty. He hated himself for wanting to wear diapers again, but he wanted it. This was this bitch psychiatrists fault.

On one of his last therapy sessions, his psychiatrist had suggested, in addition to changing his medication-again- that he might want to try “regression therapy”. Since he had suggested that since he had had such a traumatic childhood, the next step in healing him emotionally, would be for him to try and re-experience things from earlier in his childhood and reconnect with those good feelings, and that meant going back to diapers.

She promised him it would never get weird, and that if he felt too uncomfortable, it would stop. It never got weird: it never had the time to. His psychiatrist had to take an extended leave of absence after her son died at his own 18th birthday party. Poor kid had too much to drink and choked on his own vomit while all his little friends were trashing the house. So she went to bury her child and grieve, and Johnny used the opportunity to slip under the radar and never call again as he paid for his new apartment under a new identity.

Still, the idea had been put in Johnny’s head and one day he decided to try it out. It worked; too well in fact. With the crinkle of the plastic, and the feeling of the padding between his legs and the sounds of the tapes, memories of his early childhood came flooding back. Emotions of contentment and happiness came flooding back. For the first time since he could remember, Johnny had felt complete and safe…and it had all been while wearing a diaper.

The problem was, that was the only time when Johnny had felt relaxed and complete. When he wasn’t wearing a diaper, he was Johnny Spettro, orphan of a crime lord, former ward of the state breaking parole and constantly focused on killing the men who had ruined his life.

The only time when he was able to actually relax was when he was wearing a diaper and pretending to be a baby. He couldn’t sleep unless it was in his crib wearing a diaper. Hell, he couldn’t even relax enough to get an erection unless he was wearing one. Damn it, he was some kind of freak.

He’d never be with a woman again now that he had this fetish. Who in their right mind would want to play mommy to a guy who wanted to be a baby? Even his porn was starting to skew towards diapers. To Johnny’s utter relief and disgust, there were even such websites that featured women and men scantily clad wearing nothing but baby clothes and diapers. There were even story porn sites dedicated to fantasies of being treated like a baby- most of them forced.

Most of all, Johnny liked the POV movies that showed a woman taking care of a man as if he were a baby. The guy was holding the camera, so you never saw his face, and the actress playing “mommy” never used names. How Johnny wished he could be that lucky stiff. On the bright side, beating off in a diaper made Kleenex’s redundant and unnecessary.

Johnny finally lost the battle with himself. He needed sleep so that he could be ready for tonight, and that meant just ignoring his embarrassment and shame and going forward with the deed. He laid down in his crib and positioned himself on the diaper. As he leaned forward and pulled the front of the diaper up over his genitals, he closed his eyes and pretended he wasn’t diapering himself. He imagined that he was still a baby and that it was his mother smiling down on him as she taped up the sides of his new diaper before bedtime. It just wasn’t the same though. But it would have to do. Maybe after this whole crazy thing was over, Johnny could find a fetish dating site, and try and find an actual woman on there who would accept him and his damaged goods psyche. One step at a time though, eyes on the prize.

How embarrassing would it be to find out that the guy who had killed two crime lords in less than a week wore diapers to bed and slept in a crib? Johnny smiled at the thought that there might be people who’d be more embarrassed about his fetish than he was. Getting your ass killed by a punk that you should have killed years ago was one thing, getting your ass killed by a guy who beat off to adult diaper changes was a whole other story.

But Johnny wasn’t really in the mood for porn tonight. He just needed to feel safe, secure, and loved. So he rolled over into his crib. He made sure his gun was tucked safely inside his teddy bear just in case. He checked to see if the special padding under his home-made crib was there, pulled up the rails to the crib. Finally, secure in his privacy and in his preparations, he drifted off into a sleep filled with dreams of happier and more innocent times.