by Sol Yurick
They walked down the beach for a few blocks. They turned in toward the land and began to walk home. It was close to six o’clock now and it was completely light on the beach. The shadows were still hard and dark in the streets. The seawind blew warm dirt up from the streets. Here the wind smelled of salt, rank weeds, picking up the smells of decaying houses, sour old wood, carrying the garbagy smells of concession-refuse inland.
They walked till they came to the candy store where they always met. Some girls were sitting there, perched on the news-box. They had been waiting all night—Hector’s woman, Bimbo’s woman, Dewey’s woman, and The Junior’s woman. They talked and the daughters told them that Arnold had made it back hours ago. Arnold had told them all about it and that Ismael had just disappeared. No one knew what had happened to him. They told Hector and Bimbo’s women as much as they knew about their men. The girls nodded, kept their faces cool, lit cigarettes, and blew smoke out of their noses. They shook hands all around and parted. Bimbo’s woman began to weep; Hector’s girl put her arm around her, holding her, as they walked away. Dewey and The Junior went off with their women, arms around one another. Hinton waited till everyone was out of sight and walked toward The Prison.
Both sides of the street were still in morning shadow. A lot of the houses here were old and wooden, unpainted clapboard, leaning, supported by the fact that they were up against one another. He wasn’t going to be the Father after all, Hinton thought, not unless he wanted to duel Arnold for it. He could see himself putting Arnold down, for hadn’t he gotten his man and hadn’t he led a raid? He wished he had a girl to wait for him like the others had. A girl would watch him man-to-man with Arnold, like he had fought the sheriff. She would fall in love with him. He thought again of a vague girl. He saw himself winning her, going with her, like the others. He saw himself having sex with her. He didn’t think of it so much in excitable terms; somehow it was . . . clean . . . dignified. But if he got a woman, he knew he wouldn’t really care about being the Father because if you had what you wanted, what was the point of fighting? It wasn’t worth it. At least now he had won his rep, and now they knew him to be a man who could lead, even if he did not always choose to fight—certainly not for the leadership of the Family. For hadn’t he brought the remnant home? Arnold hadn’t done that, and Hector, Bimbo, Lunkface, they hadn’t been able to do that either. It would be enough to be a big man of the turf and get, perhaps, an Uncleship. Then he should be able to get a steady girl instead of having to take the kind of girls everyone made it with.
He came to The Prison. It was a four-story brick apartment house. They lived on the top floor. Their apartment had been found for them, as always, by the Department of Welfare, and it was the twentieth place he had lived since he had been born, or five more places than he was old. Most of the hallway lights were out. The stairs leaned free from the walls; Alonso called them free-floating. He stopped inside the front door and listened. They must have caught Hector, Bimbo, and Lunkface who might have talked; they might have sent cops to wait for him. He heard nothing except for the crazy old Jew-lady moving around on the ground floor. But then, she never seemed to sleep, always muttering to herself—a witch. You had to look out for her because she had a glass eye and a claw hand and she said wild words. Some, like his mother, said she could hex you, but he didn’t believe in things like that.
He waited. He heard nothing. He took the chance and began to walk up the stairs. He was all fagged out. The only sound was the creaking of those prison steps—hard to walk up.
The top floor had four apartments, two left and two right, facing one another. There were two toilets in the center, one for every two apartments. Before going into his house, he went to the toilet. He always shit half-standing, never willing to sit on the seat, but today he couldn’t do it. Too tired. The walls, though it was still too dark to see, were covered with inscriptions, and in the time they had lived there, he, his brothers, his sisters, had all added their words. Roaches froze on the walls. The sound of his piss falling into the toilet was loud, but familiar, and comforting. He could feel the sense of relaxation working its way around his body from his emptying insides. He leaned his head against the wall to the side and almost fell asleep. When he had finished, he went into the cell.
There was no light bulb at that end of the hall. He lit a match. On the wall, next to his door, he wrote “Fuck Norbert,” at the bottom of a long list of Fuck Norberts. He opened the door. The door opened directly into the kitchen. There was a little room off to his right. It was dark there. Three of his younger brothers and a younger sister slept there; no one moved in the blackness. In the kitchen there was a pile of clothes on the floor, some pans of cooked, now cold food were on the stove, a few empty beer cans lay around, there were some half-filled food cans his mother had forgotten to put away, and unwashed dishes were on the table and the sink-shelf and in the sink. He went through the kitchen. As he moved through the hot, unmoving air, flies rose. The baby lay in a crib on wheels and was crying rhythmically. Hinton rocked the crib once, twice, and went on through.
The next room was a dining room-bedroom. A little light came through the open door from the front room. His mother, Minnie, fat, perspiring in the stifling sweat and baby-pissed air, was being fucked by her man, Norbert, who had been living with them, on and off, for about two years now. As Hinton passed through their faces looked in his direction and though their eyes were wide open, they didn’t seem to see him at all, only glared in his direction. Minnie’s fat, round face was full of pleasure, only she looked like she was being tortured and she made little shriekgrunt sounds. Norbert’s face was round too, but Hinton didn’t see it clearly; Hinton knew that Norbert’s lips were curled back and he was grinning, but it wasn’t really a smile. Norbert made panting sounds like exhorting a horse to come on in. The bed made a creaking, monotonous, pleasure-sound.
“Get out of here or I’ll clout you,” Norbert said, but he said that all the time anyway.
“Where you been? I been worried sick,” Minnie said and shrieked and frowned and closed her eyes and moaned.
Hinton went into the back room. It was lighter here. The light and dust on the windows opaqued the morning into one steady sheet of gray light. Alonso and his older sister were in the opened couch-bed together. Alonso hadn’t been home in two weeks now. They were lying there, naked, with only a sheet to cover them. She slept on her back with her mouth open and the bottoms of her eyes open, but not seeing. Alonso’s hollow cheek was propped up on his hand and he was staring into the darkness where his Mother and Norbert were making it. His other hand drooped over the side of the bed and his fingers were propped on his bongo because Alonso never moved without his bongo to give him the beat. His fingers kept time to the bed-creak. Hinton looked down at Alonso and heard the bed-creak, baby-wail, Norbert-pant, shriek, and soft thump of the bongo again and again. Alonso didn’t look at Hinton at all, but his skinny face had that smile that made you have to hate him; the smile that told you that he knew the answers, had seen it all, and anything you did was foolish, too childish for words. Well, what did you expect of a junkie, Hinton thought meanly.
But, unable to stop the excitement of having to show Alonso what he had done that night, he said, “Man, you know what happened tonight? You know where I’ve been? You know what I did?” And Hinton squatted beside the bongo, close to Alonso to tell him.
“That Minnie. That Norbert. Tick tock. Predictable,” Alonso said.
Hinton began to tell about his night.
“Jim, you been playing soldier. When will you learn? When are you going to stop that bopping and, you know, punk stuff?”
And Hinton, as he had so many times, tried to tell Alonso about the Family and what it meant, and how they had gone through so much that night.
But Alonso kept smiling that smile and nothing made any sense with that smile looking you in the face. “Jim, don’t tell me that, you know, brother-shit. I have been through it all. Take, you know, advice. Ther
e is only one thing and that is the kick, the Now. Nothing else counts. Get yours. Get it because, you know, no one cares and they will always put you down in the end, Jim, and the only word that counts is, you know, Now. Not that foolish brother and bopping jazz, Jim. Now. Because if it all don’t go up in any, you know, twenty minutes; up, all gone; then they are going to put you down and keep you down. Now.”
It was an old argument. Hinton couldn’t argue about it. He couldn’t tell Alonso that he was a junkie and alone and that was a terrible way to be and so couldn’t understand what it meant to have a Family. But Alonso smiled that what-do-you-know-about-it smile, and against that look, nothing could prevail. But Hinton told it anyway. Alonso’s fingers kept the time beats. Hinton watched a bubble of spit on the corner of his sister’s lips and beads of sweat rolling down her breasts to the cleft. And when he had finished, the smile hadn’t changed one bit and Hinton was sure Alonso’s scorn was boundless.
He stood up. The baby was still crying, but Norbert and Minnie had finished. Hinton went back through their room and into the kitchen. He shook the crib. The baby stopped crying for a second. He looked around and went over to a pan on the stove; there were a few French fries left in it. He took one and brought it over and put it in the baby’s mouth. It stopped yelling and began to suck. He went back through Minnie’s room. They were lying, fat cheeks pressed together, smiling, and the light gave them a sweet cherubic look now, as they rested up for the next jazzing. He went back past Alonso’s smile and around the bed and he opened the window and climbed out onto the fire escape and sat down, his back against the wall.
He could see far down the alleyway behind the housebacks. The light was hot, thick, uniform, and poured down like something boiling into the spaces between the houses. The back-yard trees hung limp and hot, their leaves dusty. Hinton’s knees drew up tighter, tighter, till his whole body was pressed tightly together and he clasped his shins tightly and his head was pressed into his kneetops, and his eyes stared out over the trees and through the laundry lines toward where the sea would be if it wasn’t blocked off by a big hotel.
And after a while, he lay down on his side, his head on his crumpled hat, and kept curled up there, staring, his thumb in his mouth, till he fell asleep.
How I Came to Write The Warriors and What Happened After
Sol Yurick
It’s hard to remember when the idea for The Warriors first hit me. All memory, even when there are hard records, is tricky. When trying to recollect and reconstruct the fragments of memory, time sequences become scrambled; effects are substituted for causes; events that occurred in sequence seem to have happened at the same time. Of the fragile bio-chemical-electrical basis of memory storage, who can really say?
I think I read Xenephon’s The Anabasis when I was in college (1945, after I got out of the army, until about 1951). Originally, I wanted to be a scientist but I finally had to accept that I had no aptitude for mathematics. I gravitated to psychology but found that I couldn’t believe in anyone’s theories. I switched and majored in literature with a philosophy minor. As I read the philosophical texts, I began to regard philosophers with suspicion. What they talked about, I didn’t see in the world around me. For instance it seemed to me that Socrates, in The Republic, never answered Thrasymachus’s might-makes-right proposal: therefore all philosophy stopped waiting for an answer.
The Warriors replicates the journey in The Anabasis. I didn’t read Xenephon’s book—the Penguin edition; translation by Rex Warner, titled The Persian Expedition . . . or was it called The March Upcountry?—for any course, although I did begin Homeric Greek but dropped out after a month or so. One might note, and perhaps it isn’t, on a deep political-psychological level, that The Anabasis took place in what is now Iraq, where “Western Civilization” is taking another defeat.
It was sometime during my college years, influenced by my first encounters with the great books of Western literature, that I decided I wanted to become a writer. My literary heroes of those years were Kafka, Dostoyevsky, and Joyce, later to be replaced by Proust. The New Criticism was becoming the dominant mode of literary analysis. This theory discouraged reading any work with reference to biography, history, politics, or culture. Critics were enjoined to treat the work as a self-enclosed, aesthetic object which, if it was great—or made great by a cabal of celebrators—always reflected something called “The Human Condition.” (It was the conceit of the time to think that this “Human Condition” was the same everywhere and everywhen, a point disputed by post-modernists.) Psychoanalysis and its heretical variants were beginning to become democratized, permeating all (well, at least the middle class) sectors of society; most of the leading critics of the time were Freudian. The Sartrean version of existentialism (absurdism and the tragic condition of Man—we didn’t speak of Woman in those days—tragic because Man was condemned to death) became, along with its opposite, logical positivism, the fashionable philosophies in dialectical conflict. No one dared speak of Marxism in those early Cold War years. What psychoanalysis, existentialism, and the New Criticism had in common was the emphasis on individualism.
The Cold War influenced all fields of discourse. Unbeknownst to me, the great canon of Western literature was used as a tool in the propaganda war against Soviet-style communism with its socialist realism and contempt for the now historically outmoded, great “bourgeois” canon of literature, and the “decadent formalism” of modernism (read Eliot and Joyce, for instance).
One of the great acts of faith of the time was that the creative artist was seriously neurotic. In fact it was supposed to be dysfunction that fueled the artist’s ability to create. Of those who didn’t create, “ordinary” people who were psychotic or neurotic, we didn’t speak; neurosis was still, in those days, an elite condition.
It was in this climate that I decided to become a writer. I had discovered, writing term papers, that I had a natural aptitude for creative and imaginative writing. This was odd; I didn’t speak English for the first five years of my life. Later, as soon as I began elementary school, I became a compulsive reader (by high school I was reading four books a week beside my schoolwork).
I wanted to be a serious, perhaps avant garde writer. I disdained popular culture, although I read popular material (such as comics and science fiction, which was not regarded seriously in those days) and loved the movies. At first I wrote poetry, then later short stories and novels. In those days the mythology had it that you began with short stories and graduated to novels. My exposure and attraction to modernist experimentalism not withstanding, I also believed in “the story,” the narrative bound—no matter what games you played with text—by the reality that takes the human through space, time, and society toward death, a reality in which events occur in sequence. I was, being young, naive about what it took to become a serious writer. I believed that talent alone would ultimately succeed. At the same time I secretly wondered if reputation wasn’t also to some extent a function of promotional propaganda (which I consider the discipline(s) of aesthetics to be) that made the “great” work. It seemed as if “serious” analysis by “serious” critics, using properly obscurantist jargon turned the work into a commodity that would allow for a working class of meaning-miners to forever uncover layer after layer of hidden meaning and elevate the silliest of works into objects of worshipful greatness. (Years later I was to read Schucking’s The Sociology of Literary Taste, which confirmed my suspicions. And even later on I was to discover our State’s—the omnipresent CIA [it made the reputation of Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago, really a second-rate book, for instance, and funded prestigious literary magazines] among other agencies—interest in literature. But that’s another story.)
Skip ahead a few years; it’s sometime in the period of 1950–55; I was writing and submitting short stories and writing novels. The stories were regularly rejected. In order to stay alive, I had gone to work for what was then known as the Department of Welfare of N.Y.C. I came in contact with, as it we
re, the lower social and economic depths . . . impoverished families, culturally and racially different. I went through a kind of social shock. I had grown up in poverty during the Great Depression. My own family had been preserved from disaster during the Great Depression of the ’30s by receiving welfare checks. But the difference between my clients and my parents’ generation was huge. My parents were communists. They thought of themselves as the coming elite of the world, in fact even a new and superior species, the Proletariat. History was supposed to be on their side. They fought and organized. My clients did not. I couldn’t understand why. If you were poor and society was against you, you either fought politically or became a crook, as a loan shark, who had considered the options during the Depression, told me. What other choice was there? I was later to understand the complex reasons that led to what seemed their passivity.
Some of the children of these families were what was then called Juvenile Delinquents. Many of them belonged to fighting gangs. Some of these gangs numbered in the hundreds; they were veritable armies. This social phenomenon was viewed, on the one hand, as the invasion of the barbarians, only this time they came from the inside rather than from the outside. On the other hand, there was something subversive about the gangs (and especially the music that they loved . . . rock). The social thinkers, academic and popular, failed to understand why these social formations of the deprived crystallized in the midst of what we were told again and again were economically good times.
The media inflated the gang phenomenon to mythic proportions. (Of course they spoke of the “lower” classes: of the existence of violent middle-class gangs, nothing was said.) But then the media deals in the commodification of fear, alarm, and scandal. The New York Times ran a multipart series. What seemed like a national eruption of juvenile gangism also gave rise to a publication and theatrical industry. Books proliferated: Rebel Without a Cause (the title, and contents of this book almost implied that if the rebel had a “cause” there would not be rebelliousness but possibly rebellion), The Blackboard Jungle, The Amboy Dukes, etc. A famous killing in New York led to a theatrical production (actually two; Paul Simon’s spectacular failure being the second), West Side Story (Capeman, Salvatore Agron, meets Romeo and Juliet; trivial and silly), and Warren Miller’s The Cool World. The academy produced a mass of sociological and psychological studies.