Richie

by Thomas Thompson

  Long after the Blackstone Summer was forgotten by most, someone asked Mark Epstein what it had been like those hot months of 1970. The boy’s face lit up in happy recollection:

  “Nobody knows how it got started, but a bunch of kids started hanging on the corner, a few doors down from Richie and Brick. We used to sit on the lawns, sniff glue, nail polish, whatever we could get. Brick ran around with a can of Krylon in his hip pocket. Everybody saw it, everybody knew what it was for. It was a spray enamel, but Brick wasn’t buildin’ model airplanes, that’s for sure. You’d spray it into a paper bag and put your head inside and get a quick high.

  “The cops never liked the Blackstone scene. But everybody was there. Word got around. If you needed a place to hang, you’d just bop over to Blackstone Avenue and you’d find everybody you knew, sittin’, smokin’, sniffin’, humpin’.… The music was good, pussy was always around. Everybody tried to make it with everybody else’s girl. But the girls were tough. Like boys. They used to wrestle us.

  “Brick used to kick cars and throw eggs and yell ‘Fuck you’ at any grown-up who drove by. The grown-ups would yell back, ‘You seventeen-year-old degenerate!’ Everybody knew Brick.

  “If you were a kid and you hung out on Blackstone Avenue, you’d have had the time of your life. It was like a white ghetto. But it got heavy toward the end. Too many weirdos started coming around. If it didn’t die out when it did, there would have been a lot of trouble.”

  Mark’s memory went blurry when he asked if he could recall what caused the Blackstone Summer to “die out.” “Somebody got stabbed or something like that,” he said. “I don’t remember the details, except it was some hassle over the Chalkbuster album.”

  Was Richie involved?

  “No.” Mark answered quickly. “He didn’t hang with us too much on Blackstone Avenue. His old man said he would beat the shit out of Richie if he caught him down there, and I think Richie believed him. I think that was the summer Richie started hating his old man. At least, it never got any better between them.”

  Before they went to bed the night of the chase with the rubber hose, Carol spoke with George. She wanted an end to the hostilities. “I think we should all promise to lower our voices around this house,” she said, although hers was never at the pitch of her husband’s and her son’s. “I simply cannot stand all this yelling.”

  George agreed. “I just can’t get through to him anymore,” he said. “It’s those kids he’s running with. They’re a great influence on him. Brick is everybody’s favorite, and Mark and Peanuts are no prize, either.”

  “These kids come and go,” said Carol gently. “They always have. They fall out of favor with each other. School starts soon and maybe he’ll find some other friends. Besides, anything is better than that Harold kid.”

  Again George agreed. The Harold incident had frightened him and made Carol almost hysterical.

  It had begun in late May or early June, when George had first set up the backyard pool. Richie asked his mother one afternoon if he could bring a new friend, a boy named Harold, home for a swim. Carol quickly granted permission. She still remembered well the years when Richie had few friends, and she encouraged him now to bring classmates home.

  But when Harold arrived, Carol was a little taken aback. Harold was a gangly black youth, with a mushrooming Afro haircut. He was the son of a pastrycook in nearby Hempstead. But he was polite and well-mannered, and Carol put aside her initial discomfort. “I reasoned with myself and decided it was all right,” she told George, who allowed once more that he held nothing against responsible black people.

  Richie and Harold started hanging together, to use the voguish East Meadow term. They became so friendly that Brick faded from Richie’s room, which satisfied both George and Carol considerably. But the assistant principal from East Meadow High telephoned one afternoon and told Carol, “Don’t get alarmed, Mrs. Diener. Richie has been in a fight and has a bloody nose.”

  Questioning her son, Carol learned in bits and pieces that there had been a fight in the school locker room. Richie suspected Harold of ripping off a rock concert ticket. Harold heatedly denied the charge, in turn accusing Richie of stealing his Afro hair pick. When Richie denied this, saying that he had no need for a “nigger comb,” Harold pulled a knife. The black boy and the redhead squared off as a crowd gathered. In fury Richie charged Harold, knocking the knife from his hand and landing a punch square on his mouth. His opponent managed a few defensive blows, but Richie pinned him under a bench and pounded his face.

  When someone yelled that the vice-principal was on his way, Richie let Harold up. Wiping the blood from his face with a towel, Harold said, “It ain’t over, Diener. I’m gonna get you. It’s not gonna be at school. It’s not gonna be when you expect it. You won’t ever know when. But I’m gonna get you.”

  Carol absorbed the story as best she could. She asked if marijuana had been in any way involved. Richie shook his head vigorously. “Nah,” he said. “It was just a fight.”

  For the next few nights, every time Richie left the house, Carol fretted. “I die a hundred deaths until he comes back in that door,” she told George. He dismissed her fears. It was only a falling out between kids, he said. And he was-pleased that Richie had defended himself so well.

  Then Harold moved away to another village. The tension eased.

  One night soon after, Richie came home with welts on his arms. He had been jumped by “two black kids” working for Harold. They had sticks and they had beaten Richie severely. A night or two after that, Richie was surrounded by a gang of black youths as he rode his brother’s bicycle in the neighborhood. Police who were coincidentally passing by broke up the “ambush,” as Richie called it, before anything happened. Then a neighbor called Carol to say that several black youths rang her front-door bell in mistake, looking for Richie.

  Carol begged George to intervene, but he was reluctant. The situation, he said, was something Richie should work out for himself. Besides, the less conversation he had with his son, the less opportunity there was for a confrontation. “My new policy,” said George, “is silence.”

  Richie spent hours on the telephone eliciting the support of his friends. He told his mother that “horrible things are going to happen to Harold and his gang.” Carol feared a suburban gang war was about to break out.

  Her son reeled off so many promised acts of vengeance that Carol insisted George speak to him. She was so worried that he agreed. “I don’t know what this thing is all about,” said George to Richie, “but one thing I don’t like is all these threats. All this talk of revenge and ‘getting people.’ I’ve heard this too long out of you.”

  Richie looked surprised. But he was interested in what his father was saying. George continued.

  “The thing about threats,” George said, “is that if you make too many and don’t follow through on them, nobody is going to believe you. I hear you on the telephone threatening holy hell. I hear you saying, ‘I’m gonna get so-and-so. If he comes after me, I’m gonna pull a knife on him.’

  “Let me tell you something about weapons. Never pull a weapon unless you are prepared to use it. Because if they do come at you, you’ve gotta use it. When I was in the State Guard having riot training, I was supposed to be seventeen but I was really sixteen, I remember them telling us, ‘Never fire over the heads of a crowd.’ If you’ve got to fire, fire low, but fire to hit them. If they think you’re just trying to scare them, you’re lost.”

  George’s remarks must have affected Richie in some manner, because he stopped announcing his intentions of taking care of Harold. In fact, the situation deteriorated and went away. Carol never knew why. She was only glad that her nights of waiting, “a nervous wreck until Richie came through the door unhurt,” were over.

  Toward the end of the Blackstone Summer, George and Carol were watching television when a man rang the doorbell. Answering it, George encountered a stranger, a man distraught and near tears. He identified himself as a
Mr. Craig and he had a teen-age son who had just been stabbed on the corner of Blackstone Avenue.

  Instantly George tensed. He dreaded the next question. He could almost mouth it silently as Craig asked, “Is your son Richie here?”

  “I don’t know,” said George. His face was glass, ready to break. “Is he involved?”

  Craig shook his head. “No. I’m trying to find out about the boy who did it. Apparently Richie knows him, or at least somebody down there says he does.”

  George felt the relief rushing through him. “I’ve ordered Richie to stay out of that jungle on the corner,” he said.

  “He wasn’t there tonight. Some kid named Oscar told my boy to go to a record shop over on the Hempstead Turnpike and steal a certain album for him. When my son refused, this Oscar pulled a knife and pushed it against his chest as a threat. He kept pushing and pushing … and my boy’s in the hospital.”

  Now George had enormous sympathy for the shattered father standing in his doorway. Here was another member of the bewildered parents league. “I’ll find out what I can,” promised George, “but in the meantime I urge you to call the police. Have this thing investigated. For some reason, parents seem unwilling to call in the police when their kids are involved. But we’ve got to stop what’s going on out here. Please. I urge you. Call the police.”

  As Richie began his junior year of high school in the autumn of 1970, there existed in the Diener household a fragile period of tranquillity. The summer’s violence—the episode with Harold, the stabbing on the corner, the flaring quarrels between father and son—acted as an emotional purge for the family. George and Carol took a few steps to extend the welcome calm.

  Uncharacteristically for her, Carol laid down a bill of particulars for Richie with a firmness that surprised him. First, his weekly allowance of two dollars was suspended. Indefinitely. “Whether you get spending money will depend upon your attitude around here,” she told her son. “On whether you mind your father and me, whether you do a little chore now and then. It won’t kill you. You’re a part of this family.”

  Secondly, Carol announced that Brick Pavall was not welcome in her home. “I can’t keep you from seeing him on the street, obviously,” she said. “But I can keep him out of my house. And tell him not to call here, either. Because I will hang up on him.”

  Richie opened his mouth to protest. He could usually soften his mother’s orders, if not erase them altogether. Carol allowed him no entry. “And I want you to stop thinking your father is Simon Legree or something. He loves you very much and he would do anything in the world for you. All he asks is a little respect. I’m thirty-seven years old, and to this day I wouldn’t dream of answering my father with a fresh mouth.”

  George went along with the suspended allowance idea, but he wondered if Carol would stick to it. “Richie has always gotten around you,” he said.

  A fatigue had settled over George, a hardness etching his eyes. Carol saw that the ugliness of Blackstone Summer had deeply marked him. The malaise was aging him beyond his years. He was only forty-two, but the thick curly hair of his youth was thinning and graying, and wrinkles not of time but of discontent creased his face. His good humor seemed cut off, a fountain suddenly dry. He read his newspaper in silence, put it down, looked about the living room, and said, “This country’s getting as flabby as the tattoo on my arm.” In more than two decades, the American flag had stretched and faded on George’s biceps. For all the years of their marriage, eighteen now, George had welcomed each morning as a gift. Now, more often than not, he arose with the same mask of worry and weariness that he had worn to bed the night before.

  At the dinner hour, which was the critical period of the day in which the whole family sat together, Carol tried to keep conversation pleasant and light. She took to storing up bits of family news, neighborhood gossip, some accomplishment that Richie had mentioned to her—a promising grade on a paper, a remark of praise from a teacher—and she would carefully deposit them up at the table, like hard-earned dollars put into a savings account. Failing that, she would encourage Richie to tell the plot of a television show she had heard him laughing over. Anything, reasoned Carol, anything at all to bridge the silences.

  George saw clearly through his wife’s careful plans. He knew Carol had placed herself as anxious buffer between him and his son. But he went along, as anxious as she to seize an hour of calm.

  It worked for a while, only to be shattered when an argument broke out at her table over—over what, she could rarely even remember. Only the orchestration was the same, building to a crescendo of George ordering Richie not to leave the house, and Richie, eyes afire, disobeying and hurrying out the side entrance next to his room.

  One night Richie asked the friend who was bringing him home near midnight to stop the car a block away from his house. “Can we just sit here and talk for a few minutes?” said Richie to his companion. “My old man’ll be in bed in about ten minutes, and there won’t be any hassle then.”

  But George was waiting for Richie. He heard the side door open and close quietly. He heard Richie’s soft steps into his room. He waited until Richie had had time to ready himself for bed, then George knocked at his son’s door.

  Feigning sleep, Richie did not respond. George walked to the bed and sat beside his son. He spoke in the darkness of his room.

  “There’s something between us that I don’t want,” said George. “I don’t know how it got there, but let’s work together and get rid of it. We used to have such great times. Remember them? There’s no reason why we can’t bring them back. I was thinking that maybe next weekend, you and Russell and me could go up to the Vanderbilt Estate. Trees should be pretty this time of year.”

  Awkward gaps dwelt between George’s words, for his lines were difficult to speak. He had rehearsed this scene, he had wrestled with himself and decided to make a heroic effort at “communication,” but now that it was being played, he could not speak his words as he had planned them. He jumped at random from subject to subject, remembering to keep his tone low and conversational.

  “This school year is important to you,” he began again. “The junior year really counts. You said you’ll be taking your college boards soon. I never even thought about college when I was a kid, and my father couldn’t have paid the bill anyway. But if you decide to go, and if you’ve got the grades to get in, I’ll help however I can. You’d have to get a job, but that wouldn’t hurt you, would it?”

  Richie shook his head in agreement. George reached over to his son’s desk and turned on the study lamp. The small pool of light spilled over to throw shadows on Richie’s face. How young, thought George, how very young is my adversary.

  “The generation gap or whatever they call it isn’t new, you know,” said George. “We had it back when I was a kid. Even over music. My sister and I, we had to hate Kate Smith, we had to hate Bing Crosby. We had to hate any of the stereotype establishment figures of the time.”

  “Why?” asked Richie.

  “Because they were establishment. My father put Bing Crosby practically on the altar. I’d say, ‘Boy are they terrible,’ and he’d get furious. I’ll tell you something else. I experimented a little myself. When I was your age, the temptation, the big deal was whiskey. I remember trying to drink two quarts of beer straight down in my basement and getting sick for days. Then I tried straight whiskey and I still remember the foul, terrible taste. Even now I can’t drink it straight.”

  George paused. He had hoped this would become a dialogue, but thus far he had done all of the talking. He waited for a response, but none came from the boy.

  Now George made confession more honest than any he had told the priests of his childhood. “I’m only a salesman, son,” he said. “I guess I’d like to be a forest ranger, on top of the most remote mountain you could find. But I know now that will never be. I’ve been a salesman for seventeen years and I’ll always be one. Maybe I didn’t have the potential to be anything else. But you do. You c
an be anything you want to be. If you don’t let drugs and those friends of yours mess it up.”

  Richie raised himself on his elbows. “What about my friends?” he said, his newly deep voice testy.

  “You know how your mother and I feel about Brick. He’s two years older than you, a high school dropout. I heard he got busted for marijuana. And it does seem unusual that Mark and Peanuts what’s-their-names are two years younger than you. We just wish you’d find some friends your own age.”

  Richie shook his head slowly. “But you can’t pick my friends for me,” he said.

  “I’m not trying to,” said George, his anger stirring.

  “Yes you are,” cried Richie. “I don’t tell you who to run around with.”

  “You’re sixteen years old,” exploded George. “And until you get big enough to move out of my house, I can tell you what I want to tell you!”

  “Why don’t you just get the fuck out of my room and leave me alone!” Richie pulled the pillow over his head.

  George checked his voice, for it was about to ring with fervor for the neighborhood to hear. “I’ll be happy to,” he said, “and you’ll be staying home all weekend. Is that clear?”

  “We’ll see,” said Richie. “We’ll certainly see.” But perhaps George did not hear the last, for he was gone, slamming the door behind him, regretting his attempt at man-to-man. There would never be another moment approaching tenderness between them.

  The next night, a Friday, Richie left the house before dinner and did not return until well after midnight. During those hours, he encountered Brick at a hamburger stand and spat out the scene with his father.