Beastie held his revolver pointed at Dora’s head as he backed out of the liquor store and into the box of cheese, tomato, and mushroom pizza Jacob Goldstein was carrying for himself and his sister. Beastie whirled around and pulled the trigger of the gun pointed at Jacob Goldstein’s chest. The gun blew up in Beastie’s hand, saving him a murder rap. Beastie dropped the gun and Jacob dropped the pizza box. That’s when Jacob Goldstein beat the shit out of Steve Beastie. Gave Beastie three broken ribs, a dislocated shoulder, a broken nose, a damaged eye socket, and a lot of internal injuries, to say nothing of his charred right hand from the exploding gun.

Jacob Goldstein took back the hundred and ten dollars in cash, the two cartons of cigarettes, and the package of Twinkies Beastie had stolen from the family store. Then he took the rest of Beastie’s money, his stolen credit cards, and his gold chains, which Jacob put around his neck. When the cops came, Beastie complained to them that the Jew cocksucker (he pointed a finger at Jacob Goldstein) stole his gold chains.

“What gold chains?” asked Jacob Goldstein.

“Yeah, what gold chains?” asked one of the cops, who happened to be Jacob’s younger brother Nate.

It was during Steve Beastie’s interrogation by the Brooklyn North robbery detectives that he got his nickname: Cleveland Steve Beastie from Chicago. One of their questions was: Where were you born? Beastie had no idea.

“It was either Cleveland or Chicago,” he said. “I ain’t sure which.”

He tried to explain to the cops that his mother and father traveled back and forth between Cleveland and Chicago a lot. He had no idea why. In one of those cities between one of those trips, Steve was born. He wasn’t sure if it was in Cleveland or in Chicago. And then when he was only a few weeks old, his parents died in an automobile accident driving between the two. Steve Beastie was in Chicago at the time of the accident. He had been dropped off with his mother’s younger sister. The next morning when the sister heard about the accident, she immediately looked up Chicago orphanages, picked one out, and left little Steve on the doorstep.

“It never made any difference to me where I was born,” he said, “and no one in the goddamn Chicago orphanage gave a rusty fuck either.”

A short time after Cleveland Steve Beastie from Chicago began his incarceration at Rikers Island, his grandma lay down on her living room couch one night and died. When young Steve got out of jail and came home, there were a bunch of his grandmother’s Social Security checks lying in a pile of mail by the front door’s mail slot. In memory of his sweet granny, Beastie cashed every one of her checks and spent the money on clothes, a new Oakland Raiders baseball hat, and new gold chains.