The 50s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  · · ·

  A few minutes before midnight, the musicians played their last set, and proudly packed their instruments. The trumpet player took off his sombrero, and I saw that he already had the pale and sunken face of a jazz musician. As the crowd thinned out, Riccio said, with some relief, “It turned out O.K.” We waited until the room was almost empty, and then walked to the doorway. Benny was standing at the entrance of a makeshift checkroom near the elevator. “Good dance, Ben,” Riccio said. “You guys did a fine job.” Benny grinned with pleasure.

  Just then, a boy came out of the checkroom. He seemed to be agitated. Riccio said, “Hi ya, Mickey,” but the boy paid no attention to him, and said to Benny, “I want my raincoat. I checked it here, it ain’t here.”

  “Man, you checked it, it’s here,” Benny said.

  “It ain’t here,” Mickey repeated. Benny sighed and went into the checkroom, and Mickey turned to Riccio. He was a small boy with a great mop of black hair that shook when he talked. “I paid eighteen bucks for that raincoat,” he said. “You can wear it inside and out.”

  “You’ll get it back,” Riccio said.

  “It’s a Crawford,” Mickey said.

  Benny came out of the checkroom and said, “Somebody must have took it by mistake. We’ll get it back for you tomorrow.”

  “I don’t want it tomorrow,” Mickey said.

  “Man, you’ll get it tomorrow,” Benny said patiently.

  “I want my raincoat,” Mickey said, his voice rising. Some of the boys who had been waiting for the elevator came over to see what was happening.

  “You’re making too much noise,” Benny said. “I don’t want you making so much noise, man. You’ll ruin the dance.”

  “There ain’t no more dance,” Mickey said. “The dance is over. I want my raincoat.”

  More boys were crowding around, trying to quiet Mickey, but he was adamant. Finally, Riccio pulled Benny aside and whispered in his ear. Benny nodded, and called to Mickey, in a conciliatory tone, “Listen, Mick, we don’t find the raincoat tomorrow, we’ll give you the eighteen bucks.”

  “Where the hell have you got eighteen bucks?” Mickey asked suspiciously.

  “From what we made on the dance,” Benny told him. “You can buy a whole new coat, man. O.K.? You satisfied? You’ll shut up now and go home?”

  “I don’t want the eighteen bucks,” Mickey said.

  “Oh, the hell with him,” one of the other boys said, and turned away.

  “I want my raincoat,” Mickey said. “It’s a Crawford.”

  “You can buy another Crawford!” Benny shouted at him, suddenly enraged. “What are you—some kind of a wise guy? You trying to put on an act just because Rick’s here? What do you think you are—some kind of a wheel?”

  “I want my raincoat,” Mickey said.

  “And I don’t want you cursing in here!” Benny shouted. “You’re in the Y.M.C.A.!”

  “Who’s cursing?” Mickey asked.

  “Don’t curse,” Benny said grimly, and walked away. The other boys stood about uncertainly, not knowing what to do next. In a moment, the elevator arrived, and Riccio asked the operator to wait. He went over to Mickey and spoke a few soothing words to him, then came back, and the two of us got into the elevator. Two boys from the crowd got in with us.

  “What do you think of that creep, Rick?” one of them asked.

  “Well, it’s his coat,” Riccio said. “He’s got a right to want it back.”

  “I think he stole the coat in the first place,” the boy said as the elevator reached the ground floor.

  Riccio and I walked through the lobby, already dimmed for the night, and out into the street, where we saw Louie and Gimpy getting into a car. They offered us a lift, but Riccio said he had brought his own car, so they waved and drove off. At that instant, a couple of boys dashed out of the building, looked wildly around, and then dashed back in. “Now what?” Riccio said.

  We followed them in, and found perhaps a dozen boys bunched near the entrance. I could see Mickey in the middle, red-faced and angry and talking loudly. Benny, who was standing on the edge of the group, told us, “Now he says one of the Stompers took his coat. Man, he’s weird!” He waved at Mickey in disgust and went outside.

  Riccio pushed his way into the center of the crowd and separated Mickey from several boys who were arguing with him heatedly. A few of these wore jackets with the name “Stompers” stitched across the back. “Come on, now,” Riccio said to Mickey. “We got to get out of here.”

  “He says we robbed his lousy coat, Mr. Riccio,” one of the Stompers said.

  “It’s a Crawford!” Mickey yelled at him.

  “The coat was probably taken by mistake,” Riccio said calmly. “You’ll get it back tomorrow, Mickey. If you don’t get it back, you’ll get the money and you can buy a new one. You had a good time, didn’t you?” He was speaking to all of them now, his arm around Mickey’s shoulder as he guided the boy gently toward the door. “You ought to be proud, running such a dance. You want to spoil it now? Hey?”

  Mickey was about to say something when a boy burst in through the door, shouting, “Hey, Benny and one of the Stompers are having it out!”

  Everyone rushed for the door. When I got outside, I saw Benny and another boy swinging desperately at each other on the sidewalk. Benny hit the boy on the cheek, the boy fell against a car, and Benny moved in and swung again. The boy went into a clinch, and the two of them wrestled against the car. I heard a click near me and turned to see one of the Stompers holding a switch-blade knife in his hand, but before he or any of the other boys could join in, Riccio was down the steps and between the fighters, holding them apart. The boy with the knife turned suddenly and went back into the building, and then I saw what he must have seen—a policeman walking slowly across the street toward us. Riccio saw him, too. “Cut out!” he said, in a low voice, talking to the whole crowd. “Here comes the law! Cut out!” He pushed the fighters farther apart as two of the Stompers ranged themselves alongside Benny’s opponent. “Beat it!” Riccio said, in the same low voice. “You want to end up in the can? Cut out!” The Stompers turned and started to walk away, but the rest of the boys continued to stand around the steps of the Y. The policeman, now at the curb, looked curiously at Riccio and Benny, and then at the boys. Everyone appeared casual, but the air was heavy with tension. The policeman hesitated a moment, and then went on down the block.

  “All right,” Riccio said, with a tone of finality.

  “He started to rank me,” Benny said, meaning that the Stomper had been taunting him.

  “Now, forget it,” Riccio told him. “You want a ride home?”

  Benny shook his head. “I’ll grab a bus,” he said, looking up the street, where the Stompers could still be seen walking away. Then he turned back to Riccio and said defiantly, “Man, what did you want me to do? Punk out?” He straightened his jacket, ran his fingers through his hair, and set off across the street with several other Cherubs. We watched them until they got to the corner. The other Cherubs kept walking straight ahead, but Benny turned down the side street. “You see how it can start?” Riccio said. “One minute they’re having a dance, and the next minute they’re having a war.”

  We went down the block to where Riccio’s car was parked. I got in beside him, and he drove to the corner, where he stopped for a red light. I found that my hands were shaking. The light changed, but Riccio did not move. “I got a feeling,” he said reflectively. “If you don’t mind, I want to go back for a minute.” He drove around the block until we were in front of the Y again, and then he turned the corner where Benny had left the others. And there was Benny, caught in the glare of our headlights, held down on his knees in the middle of the street by two boys while a third boy savagely hit his bowed head. The headlights fixed the scene like a movie gone suddenly too real—Benny kneeling there and the boy’s arm rising and falling—and then Riccio had slammed on the brakes and we were out of the car, running toward t
hem. By the time we reached Benny, the other boys were gone, lost in the dark; all that was left was the echo of their footsteps as they ran off into the night, and then there was not even that—no sound at all except the soft, steady ticking of the motor in Riccio’s car. Benny was getting slowly to his feet. “You O.K.?” Riccio asked, helping him up. Benny nodded, and rubbed his neck. “I figured something like this,” Riccio said to me, and then, turning back to Benny, he asked, “You sure you’re all right? Maybe we ought to stop by the hospital.”

  “Man, I’m all right,” Benny said. “They didn’t hit me hard.”

  After looking the boy over, Riccio took him by the arm and led him back to the car, and the three of us got into the front seat. We drove in silence to a housing project near the waterfront, where Benny got out, still without speaking. We watched him enter one of the buildings, and then Riccio drove me to a subway station. “Now you know about these kids,” he said as we shook hands. “They can blow up while you’re looking at them.” Riding home, I kept thinking of Benny as he had knelt there in the street, his head bent as though in prayer.

  · · ·

  One afternoon a few weeks later, I got a telephone call from Riccio. “I thought you might be interested,” he said. “The Cherubs are rumbling. They just put Jerry Larkin, from the Stompers, in the hospital. Caught him out of his neighborhood and left him for dead. He’ll be all right, but they beat him up pretty bad. I think they worked him over with one of those iron tire chains.” He said that there was now a full-scale war between the Cherubs and the Stompers, and that he had been talking with members of both gangs, trying to get them to call it off. Then he told me he was going to try to mediate again that night, and asked if I would like to go along. I said I would, and we arranged to meet at his house at seven o’clock.

  We got into Riccio’s car, and he started to drive slowly through the neighborhood. “We ought to find some of the Stompers hanging around these corners,” he said. At first, no boys were to be seen. The part of Brooklyn we were riding through was not quite a slum. The streets were lined with old and ugly brownstones, but they seemed in good repair. The whole effect was dispirited, rather than poor; it was a neighborhood without cheer. As night fell, the houses retreated gradually into shadow, but they lost none of their ugliness. The street lamps came on, casting pools of dirty-yellow light. “The Stompers used to have a Youth Board worker assigned to them,” Riccio said. “But he was pulled off the job and sent up to the Bronx when all that trouble broke up there. I guess these kids won’t get another worker until they kill somebody.” He said this without rancor, but I knew he felt strongly that the best times to do any real good with a gang are before it starts fighting and after it stops.

  Ahead of us, a boy appeared from around a corner and walked rapidly in our direction. “One of the Stompers,” Riccio said, and drew over to the curb. He called out to the boy, and when the latter paid no attention, he called louder. “Hey, Eddie, it’s me! Riccio!” The boy stopped and looked at us warily, and then, reassured, came over to the car. His face was bruised and he had a lump under his left eye. “What happened?” Riccio asked. “You get jumped?”

  “The cops busted me,” Eddie said. He was about fifteen, and he was wearing a leather jacket with spangles on the cuffs that glittered in the light from a street lamp. His hair was blond and wavy and long. “They just let me out of the God-damned station house,” he added.

  “Why’d they pick you up?” Riccio asked.

  “For nothing!” Eddie said indignantly. “We was just standing around, and they picked us all up. We wasn’t doing a thing.” He paused, but Riccio asked where the other Stompers were now, and Eddie replied that he thought they were hanging around a nearby grammar school. “But not me,” he said. “I’m going home.”

  “Good idea,” Riccio said.

  “I got to get my gun out of the house,” Eddie said. “I don’t want them coming around and finding it.”

  “Why don’t you give it to me?” Riccio said.

  “No, sir,” Eddie said. “I paid three bucks for that piece. I’m going to leave it over at my uncle’s house. Maybe I’ll see you later.” He waved and walked off.

  I asked Riccio how teen-agers could buy guns for three dollars, or any amount. He shrugged wearily and told me that salesmen of second-hand weapons periodically canvass sections where gangs are known to be active. A good revolver, he said, costs about ten dollars, but an inferior one can be bought for considerably less.

  In a minute or two, the grammar school loomed up before us in the darkness with a solid, medieval look, and we saw a group of boys lounging under a street light—hands in pockets, feet apart, and, as they talked, moving about in a street-corner pattern as firmly fixed as that of the solar system. Riccio parked the car, and we got out and walked over to them. They froze instantly. Then one of them said, “It’s Rick,” and they relaxed. Riccio introduced me, and I shook hands with each of them; their handshakes were limp, like those of prizefighters.

  Riccio suggested that they all go into the school, where they could talk more comfortably, and led the way inside. Walking down a corridor, he asked the Stompers about Jerry, the boy who had been beaten up. They said he would be out of the hospital in a couple of days. “They thought he had a fractured skull,” Ralphie said, “but all he had was noises in the head.”

  “I was with him when it happened,” one of the other boys said. “There were four of them Cherubs in a car—Benny and that Bruno and two other guys.”

  “That Bruno ain’t right in the head,” another boy said.

  “I got away because I was wearing sneakers,” the first boy said. “That Bruno came after me with that chain, I went right through the sound barrier.”

  · · ·

  Riccio pushed open a pair of swinging doors that led into the school gymnasium, and as I followed him in the dank, sweaty smell hit me like an old enemy; I had gone to a school like this and hated every minute of it. The windows were the same kind I remembered—screened with wire netting, ostensibly as protection against flying Indian clubs but actually, I still believe, to keep the pupils from escaping. Out on the floor, several boys were being taught basketball by a tall young man in a sweatsuit. Riccio went over to talk with him, and, returning, indicated some benches in a corner. “He says we can sit over there,” he said. We moved over to the corner, where Riccio sat down on a bench while the boys grouped themselves around him, some on benches and others squatting on the floor and gazing up at him.

  “All right,” Riccio said. “What are you guys going to do? Is it on or off?”

  The boys looked at Ralphie, who seemed to be the leader. “We ain’t going to call it off,” he said.

  “They started it,” one of the others said.

  “They japped us,” a third boy said, meaning that the Cherubs had taken them by surprise. “You want we should let them get away with that?”

  “All right,” Riccio said. “So they jap you, they put Jerry in the hospital. Now you jap them, maybe you put Bruno in the hospital.”

  “I catch that Bruno, I put him in the cemetery,” Ralphie said.

  “So then the cops come down on you,” Riccio went on. “They bust the hell out of you. How many of you are on probation?” Two of the boys raised their hands. “This time they’ll send you away. You won’t get off so easy this time. Is that what you want?” The boys were silent. “O.K.,” Riccio said. “You’re for keeping it on. That’s your decision, that’s what you want. O.K. Just remember what it means. You can’t relax for a minute. The cops are looking to bust you. The neighborhood thinks you’re no good, because you’re making trouble for everybody. You can’t step out of the neighborhood, because you’ll get jumped. You got to walk around with eyes in the back of your head. If that’s what you want, O.K. That’s your decision. That’s how you want things to be for yourself. Only, just remember how it’s going to be.”

  Riccio paused and looked around him. No one said anything. Then he started on
a new tack. “Suppose the Cherubs call it off,” he said. “Would you call it off if they do?”

  “They want to call it off?” a boy asked.

  “Suppose they do,” Riccio said.

  There was another silence. The basketball instructor took a hook shot, and I watched the ball arc in the air and swish through the net without touching the rim. The room echoed with the quickening bounce of the ball as one of the players dribbled it away.

  “We ain’t going to call it off,” Ralphie said. “They started it. We went to their lousy dance and we didn’t make no trouble, and they said we stole their lousy coat. Then they jumped Jerry, and that Bruno gave him that chain job.”

  “They say you guys jumped Benny after the dance,” Riccio told them.

  “He started it,” one of the boys said.

  “Don’t you see?” Riccio said. “No matter who started what, you keep it up, all it means is trouble. It means some of you guys are going to get sent away. You think I want to see that happen? Man, it hurts me when one of you guys get sent away.”

  “We ain’t calling it off,” Ralphie said.

  “Suppose they want to call it off,” Riccio said.

  “They’re punks,” Ralphie said. He stood up, and the others stood up and ranged themselves behind him. They looked like a gang now, with their captain out in front to lead them. Riccio sat where he was, looking up at one face after another.

  “Just because they had a dance,” Ralphie said. “You know what? We were going to have a dance, too. And not in that lousy Y.M.C.A. In the American Legion.”

  “Why didn’t you?” Riccio asked.

  “They took away our worker,” one of the other boys said. “They wouldn’t give us the American Legion hall unless we had a worker.”

  “You’ll get the worker back,” Riccio told them. “He’ll come back in a week or two, and then you can have your dance.”

  “He said he was coming back last week,” Ralphie said bitterly.