The social structure of a juvenile gang is very much like that of a fraternity. There is a top man, a President, a cabinet of officers, and lay members. There may or may not be a girl’s auxiliary—the Debs—and a sub-group of juveniles who are underage for the adult club, but are more or less “in training.” These younger kids are usually used to run errands, case holdups, steal hub-caps and automobile parts for sale to swell the club treasury. They are Fagin’s Tots, idolizing their older brothers and worshipping those members of the adult gang who have graduated from the streets to a life of crime, and inevitably, to prison.
It is the Twenties all over again, with the worship of hoodlumism returning. It is these snot-nosed youngsters who need to be saved.
Few gangs are interracial; it would appear the bigot and the narrow-minded are predominant in the gangs, but more likely it is the corrupting influence of parents with their casual dark references to “niggers” or “kikes” or “wops” or “spics” that does the trick. Were it not for the adult poisons poured into these kids’ ears, the gang lines might easily cross color or race or religion. But since they hate Puerto Ricans and Negroes and Jews and Catholics, the gangs are generally made up (as was the Barons) of one nationality group or race, or cultural strain.
The female’s position in the social structure of a street gang is cut and dried. She is property.
The chicks of gang kids are even more ruthless than their male counterparts, of that I’m certain. Their affairs with gang members are violent, often deadly, and if a girl is caught cheating, her punishment can range from a sound beating to the slicing of a pretty face so no one shows interest in her again. And they never talk. They never tell what happened. There are easier ways to commit suicide, more pleasant, quicker methods to take one’s own life.
And when Debs fight, there are few sights as unbelievable. Perhaps ghastly is the proper word. It is a knock-down-blot-up of the first order, with such fury and horror it is impossible to describe without the use of a movie camera.
The knees, teeth, nails, and hair-pulling carried to a strange degree are merely openers. Knives, beer can openers, hatpins in the eyes, acid, pain pain pain! A girl jumped by more than one Deb can expect to have her face slashed for life, her body racked out of shape, her vitals explored with every foul, cutting implement sick and tormented minds can design.
The Debs join the club for kicks, and they’ll get them, one way or another. Literally.
The current fad among kid gangs and their Deb auxiliaries is the carving of the current boy friend’s initials in the girl’s back, arms, or more usually, breasts, with a knife.
A sign of undying affection.
At least until the next stud comes along; which makes it difficult for the chick with someone else’s initials in her hide. I’ve seen Debs whose breasts looked like much-used trees bordering a Lover’s Lane.
Names for Deb groups are usually imitative of the parent club (as in the case of The Baron Debs), but occasionally a bright youngster will name a girl’s auxiliary The Rockettes, or The Ladies Aid, or The Bitches. It all depends on whether there is a member of more-than-average literacy and imagination, something rare in the gangs, where poverty and the fight for survival have combined to hold down the intelligence of most of the kids.
They aren’t stupid, they just don’t know any better.
With the antediluvian school system through which most of these kids are shunted, the out of touch with reality aspects of the Church, and the criminal negligence of parents, to what teachers do the gang kids resort?
FIVE
I was still a full-fledged member of the gang—minus one. A rumble. I had to show how good I was in a fight. But it seemed I might not make it that far. I had made enemies in the gang: The slicers who had wanted a piece of me in running the gantlet, friends of Flo who thought I was a wise guy, a pair of generally surly types who liked no one and were maintained on the club roster because they were case-hardened fighters. I suspected I might have to prove my worth long before the Barons hit another rumble.
Of the immediate members of the gang—that is, regulars, with whom I had the most contact—there were only two of whom I was unsure. One was an unpleasant kid with the unlikely name of Steigletz. They called him Candle, no explanation. He looked Spanish; great dark eyes and black hair cut in an old-fashioned bowl-on-the-head manner, all the more accentuating the peon look. He despised Puerto Ricans, perhaps because he so resembled them physically. He took every possible opportunity to announce his European heritage, and occasionally made references to how cool the Nazis had been in gassing anyone who got in their way. It was a short hop, apparently, from self-hatred because he faintly resembled what he took to be a lesser ethnic group, to despising the entire human race. He was a stocky boy, with broad, box-like shoulders, a deep chest and massive biceps. He kept himself in peak physical condition, another means of surmounting what he took to be a handicap, his appearance. Few kids in the gang would associate with him, much less actually chum it up. But Candle had one good friend, nonetheless.
Fat Barky was the son of a local character, Old Barky, who was renowned far and wide as the only man who would get down on all fours in a saloon and bark like a dog, in exchange for a shot of rye. His son, Fat Barky (almost 190 pounds), was forced to live with the knowledge that his father was a neighborhood joke. It made him a joke, too. Sublimation and compensation had turned Fat Barky into a bully, a loafer, a sadist, and—there were those who had reason to suggest—a pervert. He was not overly bright, and that, coupled with his doughy face, ham-like hands and massive, shapeless body made him a figure of some terror. He had been known to pick up and throw an antagonist thirty feet through a plate glass window, if the tremors struck him. He was an advocate of health foods, bar-bells and sunbaths on rooftops.
These two pretties disliked me for different reasons, but chiefly because Candle had wanted to slice me up a bit during the gantlet-run; I had thwarted him, and he felt cheated. In this particular boy, a feeling of having been cheated was equivalent to a slap in the mouth. He had allowed the mild distaste for me to grow within him as the days passed, until it was almost an obsession, brought on by the summer heat, the lack of excitement, and his mounting realization that he was getting too old to remain in the gang much longer, and might soon have to fend for himself in the adult world. It was an amalgam of reasons, and like the emotional volcano it created, it found release in hatred. Hatred of me. I was new in the gang, I was untested, I was a wise guy. Therefore, hate.
Fat Barky was his friend; his only friend, really. He didn’t need much of a reason to hate. It was all built in. So I had a pair of Kings aligned against me; God only knows how well I could have done making enemies if I had tried my fullest.
Yet in its ludicrousness, it was another lesson about the children of the gutters: they don’t need logical reasons to hate. They are time bombs, set by a madman to go off at any time. Tap them, smile at them, walk past them and they explode. They are so filled with insecurities, hatreds, tensions, their fuses grow shorter and shorter. There is no logic, no sense at all to their animosities. If you are alive—you are a possible target for their fury.
It began, the chivvying, almost from the next day.
I had more or less taken on Filene as my chick, and in the eyes of the other Debs, that made me off-limits. There are occasional loose studs in the gang, but they hook up as quickly as possible with a steady (there is usually a good bit of nonsense about “love” and “playing house”—all tied up with the fraudulent standards of sex and affection shoved down these kids’ throats by billboards, newspapers, television and the other guilty mass media). Reasons for tying the bonds as soon as possible are not only romantic, but economic and expedient. There aren’t that many girls floating loose at any one time.
So I found it very strange when Flo made a pass at me in Ben’s, the next day. Strange because we were not the best of friends, and strange because I was with Filene.
When Fi
lene and I came through the door, I noticed a stillness in the mood of the place: an expectancy. Pooch and Fish were not there, and most of the kids I knew with any real familiarity were absent. But Fat Barky was lounging up against the juke box, slapping the red plastic of one side with a slab hand. I couldn’t see into the booths in back, but there must have been Barons in them, because I heard voices. The stools up front were occupied by three girls—Cherry, Marcia and Flo whose feet were once again on the wall, as they had been the first time I made this scene.
Filene and I started to walk back, but Ben Adelstein’s voice stopped us. “Hey, how about a new kind of shake?”
I turned to look at him, and for the first time in my life I knew when someone was trying desperately to tell me something with his face. Little Ben Adelstein was scared…and not for himself.
I had my arm around Filene, and as Ben spoke again, I pulled her toward the counter with me. “Hey, kid, you want a new kind of shake I just invented?”
I answered him, but we both knew I wasn’t asking about any milk shake. “What ya got for us, Ben?”
He drew us down the front of the counter, away from the stools, and said, very loud, “Never had a marshmallow milk shake, have you?” His eyes were flipping back toward the rear of the malt shop. He was trying to tell me there was something shaking back there; I tried observing over Filene’s shoulder, searching the shadowy rear of the shop, but all I could see was Fat Barky, big as a house, leaning against that juke box.
I didn’t dare ask right out what was the matter. The three girls were too near.
Then it all happened very fast, and I was in the middle of it. I started to say something nonsensical to Ben, and I felt a hand on my waist, and someone was shoving a large breast into my back. I half-turned, still holding Filene, and finding the movement difficult, and there was Flo, pressed up against me in the most awkward manner I could imagine.
She started saying some crap that was supposed to be a come-on; I wasn’t even sure what it was—the girl had a way of speaking so that you didn’t listen. It was like turning the volume all the way down on a television set and merely watching the comical movements of the speaker’s lips. That was the way it was now.
“Hey, beat it, I’m with someone,” I started to say.
She yelled. I mean she belted the place with a howl that would have lifted the scalp from a bald man. It was a sort of half-rape, half-hysterical shout, and before I knew what was happening, one of those dim booths in the back had erupted and Candle was halfway down the line of stools, a fist pulled back, aimed at my mouth.
He was closely followed by the Heap, Fat Barky, who didn’t even bother cocking a fist. Sheer momentum would have carried him right through me and out into the street.
I was still only partially aware of the dislike I’d engendered in these two, and for them to use the unhappy Flo as a foil, and try to bushwack me was something I could not quite conceive.
Until the moment Candle swung and took me flush in the mouth. I felt Filene being ripped away from me, a hot, sticky pain went all through the left side of my head, and I went straight down to the floor.
The next thing I saw was a boot sole, and it was rapidly descending on my face. I threw myself over and caught Candle’s boot high on my shoulder. It hurt like the devil, and my arm went numb, matching my face. Everything was a misty off-grey, and while I was still very much conscious, I had the feeling this beating was being administered to someone else, not me.
He kicked me in the backside, and I doubled over—dummying up—against the base of the counter, trying to keep my face and vitals protected by wrapping my arms and legs about myself, fetus-style. Candle kept right on dealing up belts to the can, and I was able to maneuver my body so he couldn’t catch me in the kidneys.
In a few seconds—I think it was a few seconds—things began to clear for me and I could hear Filene screaming. She had tried to intercede and Flo had grabbed her by the hair. Now the two girls were struggling insanely against the wall, and Flo was getting the better of it, over Filene’s small, slim body. And in one instant I tried to get up, felt more than saw Candle pulled back, heard Ben Adelstein yell, “That Candle started it!” and the kicking stopped at once. I moved around a trifle, looking up from under my arm, and there was Pooch and Fish and Connie and Mr. Clean and half a dozen other Barons, two of them whip-arming Candle back against the magazine racks.
I tried to get up and found my legs wouldn’t support me. One of them leaned down, and I got lifted bodily to my feet. Candle was in a half-nelson by Mustard, a kid with very blonde hair and not much sense. Candle’s eyes were wild with the kill-light. He wouldn’t have stopped till I was out of it completely, a broken back, a smashed rib cage, a punctured lung.
Pooch’s face was storm dark.
“Okay, whatinahell’s goin’ on here? Cmon, what was it?”
Candle jumped in before I could collect my wits and figure out how my tongue was supposed to function. He began a tirade about how I was trying to horn in on every broad in the club, how I’d made unnecessary advances on Flo, while in the company of Filene, how I was a bad influence in the gang, and a wise sonofabitch and how I’d cheated everyone in the gantlet, and how he didn’t even think I’d carried through on the second part of the initiation and it was either Candle or me, and that was all there was to it.
I’ve never seen a kid so young get so red in the face, in so short a time. He was livid. Pooch was thoughtful. I was still semi-conscious.
Filene piped in, “That isn’t so! It didn’t happen like that! He started it, him and that stinking creep, Flo!”
Pooch motioned her to silence, and I knew he had to make a Prez-like decision. He had to maintain some status in the eyes of his gang, and at the same time he had to solve the problem without putting down one or another of us. It was a Solomon-level problem, but Pooch solved it admirably. As far as he was concerned.
“Okay. I don’t want no more fighting in here, and I want some peace between you two guys. If it’s got to be one or the other, it’ll have to be settled in a stand. That okay with both of you?”
“Yeah, great!” chirped Candle.
I didn’t say anything for a second. A stand…a knife fight with Candle…was I up to it? Here was a tough who had been handling a switchblade since he was old enough to tell one from a can opener. I wasn’t at all sure I could stand up to him. And if I didn’t, there would be no question about what would happen to me. I’d be found in an alley sliced methodically. I might not die, but the difference was too slight to worry about.
But I had no choice.
“Okay. Okay, by me. Name the place, and the weapons.”
It was a little like a Heidelberg duel. Pooch called for seconds, and Candle named Fat Barky immediately. I looked around and settled on Fish. They went off into a booth in back with Pooch, and talked in low murmurs for fifteen minutes.
Filene used a wet napkin on my face. I tried smiling at her, but it hurt, so I grimaced. Candle slouched against the counter, surrounded by Barons who wanted to keep us apart, and he smoked one after another.
Finally, Pooch, Fish and Fat Barky came back. “It’ll be Saturday morning, the dumps. Switches, Comanche style.”
I almost keeled over. Comanche-style. A regulation size hankie twisted to its full length, clenched in our teeth, one hand tied behind each of our backs, and the knife in the free hand. We had only the distance of the hankie separating us. It was the most deadly, the least-quarter-given style of gang-fighting known. Pooch was determined to settle it once and for all. The chill in my neck and shoulders spread.
That next Saturday Fish came for me in a 1952 Ford he had either borrowed or heisted, and with two other Barons in the back seat, we motored over to the garbage dump.
It was a great brown-black expanse, on the edge of the waterfront, with great piles of burning refuse dotting the horizon like blank anthills on fire. It stank. I was scared out of my mind. This was no game and it was certainly not resear
ch; this was for real, and I regretted the whole thing.
I must have tried to pull out of Brooklyn, disappear into Manhattan, a hundred times between Pooch’s announcement and that morning. Why I’d stayed was more inertia than guts.
The Ford came through a break in the hurricane fence surrounding the far end of the dumps, and Fish poured it to the floor, speeding till the group finally came into sight. There were perhaps half a dozen cars, pulled into a circle, noses inward, and all the Barons, their Debs, the junior toughs from the secondary club (The Boppers, or the Baron Juniors) were all standing around, blowing pot or just talking.
Fish floored it and raced up to the group at sixty-five, at the last moment standing full on the brakes and pulling a two-wheel drift that shot a spray of dirt in a wide arc.
The engine stalled and we got out of the car.
Candle looked as big as a mountain.
Pooch was there with his drag, a girl alternately called Goofball and Mary. She was a hippy broad, with big blue eyes and blonde hair from a bottle she should never have uncorked. It was her face that drew me. There was a look in it that I had never before seen, and have glimpsed only once since that time:
On the face of a woman staring up at a guy on a window ledge. She wanted him to take the dive.
Goofball wanted someone to die.
This, then, was the expression on the faces of the titled ladies of the Roman court in attendance at the Circuses. It was a chilly, indrawn-breath look that said volumes. Volumes from Dachau and Auschwitz and the Colosseum and every temple of horrors from the first cave to Torquemada’s Inquisition Chambers. Such depravity, such absolute absence of humanity, was the thing I first saw upon leaving Fish’s car. It was the worst possible effect. Any fun and games I might have thought to pull off, were forgotten in the sight and planes and lights of that girl’s face.
She clutched Pooch’s arm, and pressed her breast against it, oversexed with the possibility of blood and dismemberment. I swore I would not satisfy her filthy appetite that morning.