“Big man,” Candle jibed at me.
I stooped down and grabbed him by his hair, pulled him halfway up. “You ever come near me again, mienda, I’ll open you up right.” Then I threw him back down roughly, laid the blade under my boot, and bent up sharply.
The blade snapped.
I threw down the broken knife, at his feet. He was a crushed warrior; his lance had been shattered; he was out of the lists, and I was the new champ of the hardcases.
Filene’s eyes were moist and compelling.
I wanted to sleep for a week.
So this was authenticity. Gathering material in the field. I felt a leaden awareness in me, that I had been fooling myself, trying to glamorize the job.
This was a rotten way to go…sliced open like a dead fish, left to die in a garbage dump. I swore I’d never fight like that again. Ever. Even if they killed me.
I had no idea I would be tested again so soon, and that I’d have to defend myself again, come closer to death or dealing death, again. But it was to come, too soon.
SEVEN
Remembering ten weeks in a certain time-sequence is often difficult. A great deal can happen in ten weeks. A life can change or begin or end in ten weeks. But remembering ten weeks running with the children of the streets is not too difficult at all, for most of the time is spent waiting. The devil of the kids, the boredom known as Nothing’s Shaking, possesses easily. The lounging in T-shirt and jeans before the malt shop, the standing on corners, swinging around and around on the lamp post, the sitting on stoops honing the knife…all the hours and days wasted, wasted, just waiting. “I’m just waitin’ till I’m old enough to join up inna Merch’ Marine like my big bruddah Sid.” That’s the story, right there. Waiting. Waiting and watching, and helping things along if it gets too peaceful. The absolute boredom of summer hot streets, sticky armpits, dry mouths, cigarette after cigarette tasting like cornsilk. The waiting and watching, till even the prospect of balling a piece of jailbait loses sparkle. That is the commonest denominator for the kids. They wait.
That was how it went for several weeks after my stand with Candle. The peon kept out of my way, and there were rumors of tossing him out of the gang, just on general principles. His friends ceased to be his friends, and the mark of the man on his way out was put on him when Ben Adelstein cut off his credit.
Then the rumble noises began to spread all through lower Brooklyn.
A war was in the brewing between the Barons and the toughest, largest gang in the city at that time. The Puerto Rican Flyers. A club rumored to have half a dozen submachine guns someone’s brother had liberated from the US Army. A club that drank blood, it was said. A club whose members knew a code of honor that meant they got a full on-bended-knees apology for the slightest affront, or it was a stand to the finish. The rottenest club in town, it was said.
And the rumors of rumble spread.
It had started at a YMCA dance on a Friday night. A Flyer scout had found out about the Y dance in Baron territory, and for a week the Manhattan gang had planned to crash the spin. They made the scene late in the evening, when the dancers had already begun to stick close and many couples had disappeared into the parking lot. There was pot circulating, and a few bottles, and everyone was just about hammered enough to forget where they were.
A nameless Flyer stud took over a Baron girl—not a Deb, merely a date—while her boy friend was out corking up on Sneaky Pete.
The other girls, most of them Debs, made a short haul to the Baron who had left the scene, and gave him the word.
When he got back, the Flyer was belly-up to his girl, and a stand was called on the spot. Cooler heads prevailed, and the stand was moved out into the parking lot.
All the Barons and Flyers filed quietly out to the parking lot to build a wary circle as their two gladiators went at it. The Flyer was shanked, but the Baron had anticipated no trouble, and had to borrow a weapon from a friend. It wasn’t a study in grace or ethics, but it looked as though matters might settle with one of the participants getting nicked, until a hopped-up Flyer with a big taste for action decided things were waltzing, and pulled a zip. He put a .22 slug through the chest of the Baron in the stand, and things broke out heavy.
I was not there, but one of the guys relayed the story, in that surrealistic “I-was-at-a-movie-and-it-went-like-this” manner employed by kids with very little imagination. The way he told it, the United Nations would have forgotten various Asiatic tension zones to handle the case. But from diffuse and diverse reports I was able to define what had happened, fairly closely.
Three Barons had jumped the kid with the zip and stomped his head into the gravel of the parking lot. No other clear duels were contracted, because in a matter of seconds the lot was a swarm of milling, jamming, swearing and fighting guys and Debs.
The Flyers came off the worse for wear. They were out-numbered three-to-one, as the Barons were aided by non-committed warriors from friendly gangs, or just plain neighborhood kids who knew which side their turf was buttered on.
No one died (death is a seldom thing, though crippling and scarring are not), and the Flyers escaped in a stolen car. The Barons gave chase, but turned off once in Manhattan, for they were nearing Flyer turf.
But the next day, the Barons got their revenge.
Ten of them invaded Flyer turf and caught a lone stud, walking on his block. They jumped him from a slow-moving car and threw him through the front window of a nearby bar and grill. The boy went to the hospital with facial lacerations and his esophagus open. I don’t know whether he lived or not; I never heard a later medical bulletin.
It went quiet the rest of Saturday, and Sunday as well.
On Monday, the Flyers busted the trade high school where most of the Barons put in token appearances from time to time, and caught one of the original Friday night gladiators in his shop class. Ten of them held off the class and the shop instructor with a sawed-off shotgun and a Luger pistol (as well as assorted sharp edges) while three of their buddies worked over the offending Baron with keyhole saws and ball peen hammers.
The boys left him hanging by his collar from one of the posts of a wood lathe, and completely vanished. The Baron joined the Flyer of Saturday forenoon among the lists of those needing medical attention. Both arms had been broken, as well as his nose, both cheekbones, his collarbone and left leg. He had a multiple concussion, and five shattered ribs. He was lucky he’d been left alive: one of the tormenters had used a keyhole saw on his face.
The War Counselors got together at the 42nd Street Nedick’s at that point.
I was called in on Tuesday, for my opinion of the arrangements. Somehow it had gotten out that I read books; I was thus considered a “very hip guy” and my opinion was suddenly sought on such esoteric matters as:
What battleground will be used? What time? What kind and limit of weapons? Would Debs be employed? What was the rumble on the fuzz in that area, and this area, and the other area over there, huh?
A methodical procedure that would have done credit to a Disraeli. Machinations straight out of Machiavelli’s “The Prince.”
And while I was not an official War Counselor (at that point), I was able to introduce a few tactics that startled and pleased the young warriors. Oh, I was a very large cat that week.
Finally, the bickering ended, the demands settled and the lines drawn, the studs began sharpening their knives. This was to be a big rumble, a war in full dress, and this time the settlement workers would get no advance info on the scene, nobody was going to talk them out of it…this was the topic of conversation, the building of prestige, the whole show, all wrapped and waiting for the main players to step in.
We had several secret weapons. One of them was a kid named Fenster (nicknamed Fence) who had somehow (I was never sure how) acquired a Navy Very pistol that shot flares; another was a Spanish-American chick who had been double-balling (sleeping around in both turfs) a Baron and a Flyer, who could be at least fifty percent counted on to spil
l the other team’s secrets and plans; a third was a carload of rifles the gang had stolen on Thursday. I had been involved in that ploy, rather intimately.
(I must make it clear at this point that not everything I did during my term as a member of the Barons was legal; I make no apologies for this. It can be chalked up to “method acting” or protective coloration or milking my material for everything in it—whichever seems to exonerate me most fully. And you may ask yourself what I asked myself so many times numbers lack meaning: how far do you go? Where do you say no further? When they knock down an old Polish lady with two full shopping bags of groceries, for chuckles, do you join in, or hold back? When they say use the knife or you’re out of it, do you play the attentive hero with morality, or do you snap the blade into firing position? I can’t make answers for anyone else; I can only say for myself, and in my own defense, if such seems needed, that I wanted to wring every drop of juice from the rotting vegetable that was a gang kid’s life, and to do it, I had to be a gang kid. Not just intellectually, but emotionally. Down to the last nerve end, the last mood, the final indelicacy and indecency. It has to be tasted in its vilest potions to have validity. Halfways, niceties, all these merely intrude. So I am not asking for approbation, merely understanding. And a firm grasp on the concept of acts that are acts for themselves alone.)
With thirty bucks these days (garnered from selling stolen hub-caps or peddling pilfered appliances from shops or apartments), any kid can own a gun. He calls it a piece. He buys it from unscrupulous hock-shop shylocks or liaison men for fence groups. A piece is more effective than a zip. If you want to kill a guy, don’t play around with the idea; get a piece and blow his screwing head off.
The only trouble was that there weren’t enough $30 Barons around. Money was tight and so the middle-men would have to be eliminated. The gang (after Pooch’s decision) moved to ignore the slimy little pawnbrokers.
The Barons were clever enough not to stage a robbery in their own territory. Good relations—up to a point—are necessary to the continuing existence of any club, and riots, robberies, rapes in home turf can only go on so long before the neighbors start to bang the ceiling with a broom handle. Then the shopkeepers and merchants recognize that they have a crime wave on their hands, and begin to point out the kids on the streets to the fuzz.
So the Barons rode the IRT, the BMT, the Independent Subway, calmly, coolly, looking like studs out for an evening of obnoxious fun…and they made their heists in rival gang turf.
The neighborhood chosen for my group was in lower Manhattan. We made it in Fish’s heap, and the mark was a sporting goods shop singled out by Baron scouts.
The job was handled with such professional expeditiousness, I was shocked into admiration. Calm, collected, planned, very much like a military maneuver, tactically accurate and slotted to the second.
It was professional in timing and execution, as though they had been born to it. Where do they learn such things? TV, movies, true detective magazines, older brothers with enviable records from Dannemorra to big Q, Joliet to Alcatraz. Where there is a need for education, and a desire, primers are easy to come by.
Three kids handled the entry. One of them used a roll of adhesive tape, unrolling a taped circle on the plate glass of a door. While he did it, two others found the burglar alarm and jet-sprayed five cans of shaving cream into its mechanism so its bell would not be heard when the door was opened. It was a trick I’d seen used in a French motion picture. The first boy, in the meanwhile, was busy with a glass-cutter. A quick flathand smash while holding tightly to the tape (a handle of tape is attached under the circle-tape beforehand) and a round of glass hangs inside the shop. A fast reach inside, unbolt the door and open it, grab the glass with the free hand, and everyone is inside, without noise, without sweat.
The alarm rang, and it rang hard. But it didn’t ring very loud. Not with five cans of shaving cream sprayed into its guts. We cleaned the place, and came away with a trunkload of hunting rifles, three revolvers that had been in the rear of the shop being repaired, and perhaps fifty boxes of ammunition, most of them the wrong calibers for the weapons we’d stolen.
There were other raids, though, and when the final armament was stacked in the club room, we had usable tools to the tune of twenty-six rifles (from standard .30-.30’s to a lovely Husqvarna Swedish .30-.06 heavy hunting rifle), five revolvers, three pistols—and the Very pistol. That fails to include all the home-made zip guns, battering rams, blunt instruments and sharp instruments. It would have been a handy stack of force for any rebel group from Cuba to Laos.
And in their own way, I suppose, these, too, were rebels.
Strictly without cause.
The upcoming Monday night was to be JD-Day. The fight was to begin at eleven o’clock in the section of Prospect Park known as “The Jungle” (in the general vicinity of Grand Army Plaza). Pickets and scouts could be laid out earlier, but the full force of the operation was to begin at eleven o’clock, no sooner. Intelligence reports had indicated the neighborhood beat cops were no problem for almost an hour, though that figure could be cut to ten minutes if any of the apartment-dwellers living on the Avenues bordering the Park heard the sounds of combat. But there was the chance that the woods and traffic would sop up the noise initially. From fifteen minutes to half an hour was the estimated fighting time…
The more I think about it now, the more I realize these kids actually believed they were fighting for justice or some other equally abstract concept. They did not think of themselves as rotten kids rumbling. This was a matter of honor, and they were the Good Guys, ten gallon hats and white horses. The lousy spic Flyers were the Bad Guys—just as black as evil itself.
I tried talking to them during the week preceding the rumble. I have only one regret: that I was unable to tape their voices, for the conversations from memory lack much of the weariness and hopelessness of their discussions. The sense that there is really no future for them, the ineffectual animosity of their foul language: it all seems hollow without the harsh voices to lend reality.
The first one I talked to was Pooch. I got him to come out for a cup of coffee, and sat opposite him in a one-arm joint, trying to be two people at the same time.
“How long you been Prez?” I asked.
“About two years, almost two years, why?” he came back at me, instinctively wary at someone prying into his background or that secret room where the boy himself lived.
“Just wonderin’, that’s all.”
“Well, I been Prez for almost two years.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Why’d you ask that? You know somethin’ I don’t know?”
I moved in, logically I hoped. “No, I was just thinkin’, you know, maybe one of us’d get put down for good Monday, and what’ve we got to show for it?”
He looked at me quizzically. “What the hell you talkin’ ‘bout?”
I tried to explain, keeping to the semi-inarticulate patois and hand-movements of the street kids. “Well, dig; I mean, here you been Prez for two years—almost—and what if you pick up a bash Monday night? What’s the club gonna do? They’ll find some other guy and forget you. So what you got to show for all the sweat and the bopping?”
He bit the inside of his cheek. He was thinking. It was painful to watch him try formulating an abstract concept. “Well, I mean, that’d be that, wouldn’t it?” That was the closest he could come.
In that moment, no matter how many stinking things that boy had done, I felt great pity for him. He was, literally, voiceless in the world. He sat there, thinking himself strong and impregnable, and he was the weakest, most vulnerable kid I’d ever seen. He couldn’t get a handle on life. He knew there were things he was missing, ways of living that he was denying, but he’d been on the treadmill so long he was unable to get off. I felt empathy for him, and sympathy, but most of all pity. And anger, too. Anger for all the parents and teachers and clergymen and social workers who had missed the boat with this kid, who were n
ow content to merely hate him and track him through the smelly city streets, and prattle about juvenile delinquency, without realizing what it really was, without the simple understanding that it is the voicing of protest against a world that has no place for them.
“Yeah, sure,” I answered simply, “but I mean what would you do with yourself if you wasn’t in the club? I mean, like what would you be if you could be anyone?”
He stared at his coffee and then at his hands, and then at me. He’d probably never had a conversation like this before, and he was uneasy. Yet he could not simply call me a fink and get up from the table. We’d come farther than that. I had been speaking to him, not to the phony image he had been casting to everyone.
“Listen,” he finally burst out, “I don’t give a damn for none of that. You can’t make it unless you got bread, lots of bread, and I know damned well I ain’t gonna have none of it unless I work in some effing factory and I’d sooner shit than go into one of them. I’m just waitin’ for one thing, man…I’m just waitin’ till I get old enough, then I’m gonna enlist in the Merch’ Marine.”
He downed his coffee in a gulp, tossed a couple of coins on the table, and left the joint and me, sitting staring at the empty seat. Just as empty as his life.
EIGHT
Time was growing short before the rumble. And in that reckless, caged-animal attitude of the young hood, the Barons found their furies constrained. They went looking for trouble to whet their appetites, to let them try their muscles, to show them how tough they were.
They found their scapegoat.
A lone Negro boy playing basketball in a schoolyard.
Few gangs are interracial, except as I’ve mentioned before. It would appear that the lousy job of bring-up done on these kids has also imbued them with the narrow-minded, bigoted ideas of their elders. They hate Negroes. They also hate Puerto Ricans, Jews, Russians, anyone who differs from their particular accepted religious and racial norm in the turf. They tied the boy to one of the basketball standards, and worked him over. Six of them worked him over.