“I’ll tell you what,” Riccio said. “I’ll talk to the people down at the Legion. Maybe if they know I’m working with you, they’ll give you the hall.”
“We were going to have an eight-piece band,” one of the boys said.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Riccio said. “But you know how it is when it gets around that you’re swinging with another crew. You’ll have trouble getting the hall. And even if you do, who wants to come to a dance when there might be trouble? The girls won’t want to come—they’ll be too scared.”
“You sure the Cherubs said they want to call it off?” a boy asked.
“I’m going over there right now,” Riccio said.
· · ·
We drove past the housing project where Benny lived. “The Cherubs hang out in that candy store down the block,” Riccio said. He pulled up in front of the shop, which I could see was crowded with youngsters, and said, “Wait here while I take a look.” He went inside, came out again, and got back in the car, saying, “The Cherubs aren’t here yet, so we’ll wait.” We both settled back and made ourselves comfortable. It was only nine-thirty, but the neighborhood was deserted. The candy store was the only shop in sight that was open, and ours was the only car parked on the dark street. Above and behind the tops of the brownstones rose the great bulk of the housing project, like some kind of municipal mausoleum, but dotted here and there with lights as evidence that life persisted inside. Two boys came down the street and were about to enter the candy store when Riccio called out, “Hey, Benny!” They turned and walked over to the car, and Riccio said, “Get in. It’s too jammed in there.” They slid into the back seat, and Riccio, turning to face them, said to me “You know Ben, don’t you?” and introduced me to the other boy—Bruno, the one who had used the tire chain on Jerry. He was very thin, and had enormous eyes. “I’ve just been over with the Stompers,” Riccio said, without preamble. “I think they’ll call it off if you’ll call it off.”
“We won’t call it off,” Bruno said.
“Not even if they do?” Riccio asked.
“Man, they ruined our dance,” Benny said.
“Nobody ruined your dance,” Riccio said. “Your dance was a big success. You had one of the best dances around here.” He went on to give them the same arguments he had given the Stompers. They listened restlessly, shifting in their seats and looking everywhere but at him. “Well, how about it?” Riccio said, finally.
“We call it off, what else are we going to do?” Bruno asked.
“There’s other things to do besides breaking heads,” Riccio said, and then I jumped as the car shook from a violent bang against its left side and the head of a policeman suddenly appeared in the window next to the driver’s seat.
“Out of the car!” the policeman said. “All of you! Out!”
“Boy, you scared me, Officer,” Riccio said.
“Get out of the car!” the policeman repeated. “Now!”
“We’re not doing anything wrong,” Riccio said. “We’re just sitting here talking.”
“Get out of that car!” the policeman said, and with that we found ourselves staring at a gun, which he was pointing straight at Riccio’s head. It looked as big as a cannon.
“Jesus, Rick, get out of the car!” Bruno whispered from the back seat. “I’m on probation. I don’t want to fight with the law.”
“I’m getting out,” Riccio said. He opened the door on his side and the policeman stepped back, but not quickly enough. The door hit his hand and knocked the gun to the pavement.
“Oh, Christ!” Benny said. “Now he’ll kill us all!”
I shut my eyes, then opened them. The policeman had dived to the ground and recovered his gun. “O.K.—all of you,” he said tightly. He motioned with his gun, and we all got out of the car and stood beside Riccio. “Face the car and lean against it with your hands on the top,” the policeman said. We did, and he ran his free hand down the sides of our clothes, searching for weapons. Finding none, he said, “O.K., turn around.” We turned around, and he said to Riccio, “This your car?” Riccio nodded, and the policeman asked for his license and registration. Riccio handed them over, and the policeman peered at them and then went around to compare the number on the car’s license plates with the one on the registration. When he saw that the numbers matched, he said to Riccio, “Open the trunk.” Riccio opened the trunk, and the policeman looked inside. Then he closed the trunk.
“Satisfied?” Riccio asked.
“Shut up,” said the policeman.
“We didn’t do anything,” Riccio said. “What right have you got subjecting us to all this humiliation?”
“I’ll crack this thing over your head,” the policeman said, but his voice now betrayed a lack of conviction. “You’re pretty old to be hanging around with kids. What the hell do you do?”
“I’m a teacher at Manual Training High School,” Riccio told him.
“Well, why didn’t you say so?” the policeman said. He put the gun back in his holster, and Benny exhaled slowly. “How the hell am I supposed to know who you are?” the policeman went on. “It’s a suspicious neighborhood.”
“That’s no reason to treat everybody in it like criminals,” Riccio said.
“Here,” the policeman said, handing Riccio his license and registration. He seemed glad to get rid of them. Riccio and the rest of us climbed back into the car. “You see some guys in a car with some kids, how the hell are you supposed to know?” the policeman asked.
Riccio started to answer, but Benny, from the back seat, broke in, “Hey, Rick, let’s cut out of here, man. I got to get home.”
“Sure, Ben,” Riccio said over his shoulder, and then drove off, leaving the policeman standing in the street. As soon as we were well away, the boys started talking excitedly.
“Man!” Benny said. “You could of got your head kicked in!”
“Did you see that gun?” Bruno said. “A thirty-eight. He could of blowed you right apart with that gun!”
“Man, I thought we were gone!” Benny said. “And we weren’t even doing anything!”
The idea of their innocence at the time appealed to the boys, and they discussed it at some length. They both got out at the housing project, still talking. “I’m setting something up with you and the Stompers,” Riccio said. “Just two or three guys from each side to straighten this thing out. All right?”
“Did you think that cop was going to shoot you, Rick?” Bruno asked.
“He was just jumpy,” Riccio said. “Now, look. I’ll get a place for us to meet, and we’ll sit down and talk this thing out. O.K.?”
“Man, I thought we were all going to be busted,” Benny said. “And for nothing!”
They drifted away from the car, laughing, and Riccio let them go. “I’ll be in touch with you, Ben,” he called. Benny waved back at us, and we watched them as they disappeared into the depths of the project.
I asked Riccio if he was always that tough with policemen, and he looked surprised. “I wasn’t trying to be tough,” he said. “That guy’s job is hard enough—why should I make it any harder? I was making a point for the kids. I always tell them, when you’re right, fight it to the hilt. I thought we were right, so I had to practice what I preach. Otherwise, how will they believe me on anything?”
Riccio invited me to go home with him for coffee, but I said I’d better be getting along, so he drove me to the subway. As I got out, he said, “I’m going to try to get them together this week. If I do, I’ll let you know.” We said good night, and I went down the subway stairs. On the way home, I bought a newspaper and read about a boy in the Bronx who had been stabbed to death in a gang fight.
· · ·
I did not hear from Riccio again that week. The following week, I called him one night at about ten o’clock. His wife answered the phone, and said he was out somewhere in the neighborhood. She sounded upset. “It used to be like this when he was working for the Youth Board,” she said. “He’d go out, and I�
�d never know when he was coming back. Three in the morning, maybe, he’d come back, and then the phone would ring and he’d go right out again. I told him he’d get so he wouldn’t recognize his own children.”
The next day, Riccio called me. He sounded discouraged. “They had another rumble,” he said. “The Stompers came down to the housing project and broke a few heads. I got there too late.” Fortunately, he added, it hadn’t been too bad. A few shots had been fired, but without hitting anyone, and although a Cherub had been slashed down one arm with a knife, the wound wasn’t serious, and nobody else had been even that badly hurt. Riccio told me he was going out again that night, and I could hear his wife say something in the background. He muffled the phone and spoke to her, and then he said to me, almost apologetically, “I’ve got to go out. They don’t have a worker, or anything. The newspapers have raised such a fuss that the Youth Board’s got its workers running around in circles, and it hasn’t enough of them to do the job anyway, even when things are quiet. If somebody doesn’t work with these kids, they’ll end up killing each other.” Then he told me he still had hopes of a mediation meeting, and would let me know what developed. Ten days later, my telephone rang shortly before dinner, and it was Riccio again, his voice now full of hope. He said that he knew it was very short notice, but if I still wanted to be in on the mediation session, I should meet him at eight o’clock in a building at an address he gave me. “I got it all set up at last,” he concluded.
By the time I reached the building—a one-room wooden structure in an alley—it was five minutes after eight. Riccio was already there, together with three Cherubs—Benny and Bruno and a boy he introduced to me as Johnny Meatball.
“I was just waiting until you got here,” Riccio said. “Now I’ll go get the Stompers.” He went out, leaving me with the three boys. The room had a fireplace at one end, and was furnished with a wooden table and several long wooden benches. It was hard for me to believe that I was in the heart of Brooklyn, until I read some of the expressions scrawled on the walls. I asked Benny who ordinarily used the place, and he replied, “Man, you know. Them Boy Scouts.”
Bruno said he had gone to a Boy Scout meeting once, because he liked the uniforms, but had never gone back, because the Scoutmaster was a creep. “He wanted we should all sleep outside on the ground,” Bruno said. “You know—in the woods, with the bears. Who needs that?” This led to a discussion of the perils of outdoor life, based mostly on information derived from jungle movies.
It was a desultory discussion, however. The boys were restless, and every few minutes Benny would open the door and look out into the alley. Finally, Bruno said, “The hell with them. Let’s cut out.”
“I’m down for that,” Johnny Meatball said.
“They ain’t coming,” Bruno said. “They’re too chicken.”
“I give them fifteen minutes,” Benny said.
All three became quiet then. I tried to get them to talk, as a way of keeping them there, but they weren’t interested. Just before the fifteen minutes was up, the door opened and Riccio walked in, followed by two Stompers—Ralphie and Eddie, the boy we had met going home to hide his gun. They held back when they saw the Cherubs, but Riccio urged them in and closed the door behind them. Though the Cherubs had bunched together, looking tense and ready to fight, Riccio appeared to pay no attention, and said cheerfully, “I went to the wrong corner. Ralphie and Eddie, here, were waiting on the next one down the street.” He pulled the table to the center of the room. “You guys know each other,” he said to the five boys. Then he pulled a bench up to each side of the table and a third bench across one end. He sat down on this one, and motioned to me to sit beside him. The boys sat down slowly, one by one—the Cherubs on one side and the Stompers on the other.
“There you are,” Riccio said when everybody was seated. “Just like the U.N. First, I want to thank you guys for coming here. I think you’re doing a great thing. It takes a lot of guts to do what you guys are doing. I want you to know that I’m proud of you.” He smiled at them. “Everybody thinks all you’re good for is breaking heads. I know different—although I know you’re pretty good at breaking heads, too.” A couple of the boys smiled back at this, and all of them seemed to relax a little. “All right,” Riccio went on. “What are we going to do about this war? You each got a beef against the other. Well, what’s the beef? Let’s talk about it.”
There was a long silence. The boys sat motionless, staring at the table or at the walls beyond. Riccio sat as still as any of them. They sat that way for at least three minutes, and then Bruno stood up and said, “Ah, let’s cut out of here.”
“Man, sit down,” Benny said. He spoke calmly, but his voice carried authority. Bruno looked down at him and he looked up at Bruno, and Bruno sat down. Benny then turned to the two Stompers across the table. “You tried to ruin our dance,” he said.
“Your guy said we stole his lousy coat,” Ralphie said.
“You jumped Benny on the street,” Johnny Meatball said. “Three of you guys.”
“He started a fight,” Ralphie said.
“Man, that was a fair one!” Benny said.
“You started it,” Ralphie said.
“There was just the two of us,” Benny said.
“You were beating the hell out of him,” Ralphie said. “What did you want us to do—let you get away with it?”
The logic of this seemed to strike the Cherubs as irrefutable, and there was another silence. Then Eddie said, “You beat up two of our little kids.”
“Not us,” Benny said. “We never beat up no little kids.”
“The kids told us some Cherubs caught them coming home from the store and beat them up,” Eddie said.
“Man, we wouldn’t beat up kids,” Benny said.
“You got that wrong,” Johnny Meatball said, backing Benny up.
“Those kids were just trying to be wheels,” Bruno said.
The Cherubs were so positive in their denial of this accusation that the Stompers appeared willing to take their word for it.
There was another pause. Riccio sat back, watching the boys. They were now leaning across the table, the two sides confronting each other at close quarters.
“Remember that time at the Paramount?” Ralphie asked. “When me and Eddie was there with two girls?”
“Those were girls?” Bruno said.
“Shut up,” Benny said.
Ralphie then said to Benny, “Remember we ran into eight of your crew? You ranked us in front of the girls. We had to punk out because there was so many of you.”
“You want we should stay out of the Paramount?” Benny asked incredulously.
“It wasn’t right,” Ralphie said. “Not in front of the girls. Not when you knew we’d have to punk out.”
After thinking this over, Benny nodded slowly, acknowledging the justice of the argument.
Ralphie pressed his advantage. “And you been hanging out in our territory,” he said, naming a street corner.
“Man, that ain’t your territory,” Benny said. “That’s our territory.”
“That ain’t your territory,” Ralphie said. “We got that territory from the Dragons, and that’s our territory.”
The argument over the street corner grew hotter, and after a while Riccio broke it up by rapping on the table with his knuckles and saying, “I got a suggestion—why don’t both sides give up the territory?” He pointed out that the corner had nothing to recommend it, being undesirable for recreation and difficult to defend. After debating about that for a minute or two, both sides agreed to relinquish their claim to the corner. Riccio had what he wanted now; I could feel it. The boys had lost the sharp edge of their hostility. Their vehemence became largely rhetorical; they were even beginning to laugh about assaults each side had made on the other.
“Hey, Ralphie,” Bruno said. “You’re a lucky guy, you know that? I took a shot at you the other night and missed you clean.”
“You took a shot at me?” Ralp
hie asked.
Bruno nodded. “The night you came down to the project. I was waiting with a thirty-two, and you came down the street and I took a shot at you.”
“I didn’t even hear it,” Ralphie said.
“There was a lot of noise,” Bruno said. “I was right across the street from you.”
“You must be a lousy shot,” Eddie said.
“It was dark out,” Bruno said.
“You know, you could have killed him,” Riccio told Bruno.
“I wasn’t looking to kill him,” Bruno said.
The other boys proceeded to kid Bruno about his marksmanship—all except Ralphie, who had become subdued. After a few minutes, Riccio looked at his watch and said, “Hey, it’s ten o’clock. We got to get out of here before they close the place.” He stood up, stretched, and said casually, “I’m glad you guys are calling it off. You’re doing the smart thing. You get a lot of credit for what you’re doing.”
“You took a shot at me?” Ralphie said again to Bruno.
“What’s past is past,” Riccio said. “There’s no reason you can’t get along from now on without breaking heads. If something comes up, you do what you’ve been doing tonight. Mediate. Get together and talk it over. Believe me, it’s a lot easier than breaking heads.”
“What if we can’t get together?” Bruno asked. “Suppose they do something, and they say they didn’t do it and we say they did it?”
“Then you have a fair one,” Eddie told him. “We put out our guy and you put out your guy. We settle it that way. That’s O.K., ain’t it, Rick?”
“It’s better not to do any bopping at all,” Riccio said.
“I mean, it ain’t wrong,” Eddie said. “It ain’t making any trouble.”
“Suppose we have a fair one and our guy gets beat?” Bruno asked.
“Man, you don’t put out a guy who’s going to get beat,” Benny said.
The boys were on their feet now, all mixed together. A stranger might have taken them for a single group of boys engaged in rough but friendly conversation. “Listen, we got to break this up,” Riccio said. He told them again how proud he was of them, and then he advised the Cherubs and the Stompers to leave separately. “Some cop sees the five of you walking down the street, he’ll pull you all in,” he said. So the three Cherubs left first, with Benny in the lead. They said goodbye very formally, shaking hands first with Riccio, then with me, and then, after a little hesitation, with the two Stompers. When they had gone, Ralphie sat down again on his bench. “That crazy Bruno,” he said. “He took a shot at me.”
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