I’m skipping over the next few years not because I didn’t do nothing of note during that period, but because I’ve never been much interested in reading accounts of anybody’s hod-carrying. No matter whether the trade is rags, carting, transport or mischief, the experience is pretty much the same: long hard hours of drudgery, accompanied by growing skills and equally growing resentment at the fellas in front of you who won’t get out of the way gracefully and let you assume your rightful place at the table. So there’s not much more to say than that I went from boy to man. We all grow up, unless we don’t.
Monk got ten years in college—Sing Sing—for his attempted Massey mugging, of which he served five. They let him out in June of 1909, when Ma was thirty-nine and I was seventeen and still ungainful by the lights of the City of New York, but very much on track in my own system of self-employment.
Monk made straightaway for his old East Side haunts. I’d heard that he was back in town but so far I had made no effort to see him. I suppose I could plead that I was busy establishing my career independent of him, trying to take charge of the Gophers and of course attending to my Ma and May and trying to keep Marty.
The sad fact of the matter was that, much as I loved him, there was nothing Monk could do for me anymore. The Eastmans, discouraged by their chief’s unaccustomed incarceration, had more or less drifted apart, which taught me something right then and there. Namely, that there was more likely to be a leader with no gang than a gang with no leader.
Indeed, all of gangland was more or less of a mess at this time. What with reformers like Riis, the Reverend Parkhurst and his busybody Committee of Fourteen meddling about, some of the smaller gangs had disappeared altogether. Eat ’Em Up Jack McManus had taken a lead pipe to the skull during a brawl and One Lung Curran had finally croaked owing to his condition. Even Paul Kelly was gone, having moved up to 111th Street in East Harlem, north wopland, after he shot it out with Razor Riley at the New Brighton.
As for Monk’s boys Kid Twist and Richie Fitzpatrick, that rivalry had been briefly settled in favor of the Kid, who had put a hard one between Richie’s eyes in a dump on Chrystie Street just after Monk went up the river. The Kid finally got his in 1908 out at Coney Island, fighting with a Five Pointer named Louis the Lump over some dame.
All of which left only Goo Goo Knox standing between me and the unquestioned leadership of the Gophers. For if not me, then who? My boys Billy, Chick and Eddie were smart enough to know they weren’t smart enough to be the boss—and if they weren’t, Art and Hoppo Johnny, who’d grown into sizable boyos entirely loyal to yours truly, were on hand to remind ’em. Down the Village, I had my pal Tanner Smith of the Marginals keeping tabs on the Dusters for me. Then there was Jimmy Hines, the pol I’d met with Plunkitt, who was rising fast within the Wigwam.
I’d even found a friend up in Harlem in the person of Hiram, the shoeshine boy who’d moved uptown with his family and the rest of the colored people from the West Side after the Jews started selling and the Irish and the Germans started moving. He wasn’t shining shoes no more either, thanks to a singularly large pair of feet that came his way one day. They belonged to Mr. Jack Johnson, the heavyweight champion of the world, who plunked his doggies down on Hiram’s stand one afternoon and was so pleased with the results that just like that he offered him a job in his entourage as a valet. Mr. Jack always liked to look swell, which drove the white people crazy, especially when he stepped out on the town with one of his white wives.
Hiram had been with the champ in Australia when he snatched the title from Tommy Burns in Sydney in 1908 and, in the summer I’m talking about here, had gone out to Reno to witness Jack give a washed-up Jim Jeffries the beating of his life.
“You should see him, Mr. Owney. When he hit a man, the man done stay hit, don’ matter whether he white or colored, he got to go down. He got a will of iron, Mr. Jack. He got pride. He a man.”
“He’s the champ.” My attitude toward coloreds was that they weren’t no worse than anybody else.
“Mr. Jack’d like you.”
“I’d like to meet him someday.”
“Sure you will. Jes’ let me know.”
Everything was rounding into place. It was time to make my move, for sure at nearly eighteen I wasn’t getting any younger.
Chapter Fifteen
What finally made up my mind was a conversation I had with my sister one hot night that summer. We were up on the roof, trying to find the oxygen in the air.
“You don’t need Monk no more,” she said, sensing what was on my mind. That was the thing about me and May—she always knew what I was thinkin’, half the time before I did myself. “You’re Owney Madden of Tenth Avenue. It’s like what the nuns said about…”
I looked over her way and realized that, at fifteen, she wasn’t no kid no more. How she’d grown up so fast, when I wasn’t looking, puzzled me. I didn’t want nobody gawking at my kid sister, certainly none of the lowlifes in the gang, and the thought of somebody’s paws on her made me hopping mad just thinking about it.
“Hey! Ain’t you listenin’ to a word I’m saying?” She brought me back to earth with a shove.
“About nuns?”
“No, silly—Moses.”
“I thought we were talking about Monk.”
She made like she was going to hit me again. “Moses could lead his people to the Promised Land, but he couldn’t get there his own self.”
I guess I just didn’t get it.
“Come on,” she said. “I’ll show ya.”
We rose, she took my hand and we walked toward the city, not the river. The river was dark, as always. New Jersey was dark, as mostly. But New York wasn’t.
“See that?” says she, standing near the edge of the rooftop, facing east. I held her arm tight so she wouldn’t fall.
Lights. In the pitch-dark, lights. Electricity was all the rage then. I kenned the whole town, 14th to 50th, aglow. Gopher territory. My territory. Home.
“The Promised Land.”
She said it in a voice that, like her body, was making the transition from girl to woman, plunging from high little-girlish to something lower, throatier. You still had to lean in close to hear her properly, though, which I didn’t mind. She smelled like fresh soap.
We stood there for a while, watching the lights flicker and wink. The only sounds were those our breathing made as we turned and walked back.
As we passed by my coop we could hear the birds, gurgling in their sleep, dreaming their avian dreams. If we dreamed of flying, did they dream of walking?
“Is it true they mate for life?” May asked.
I wasn’t much in the mood for a discussion of the mating habits of pigeons, but she persisted. I wondered how much she knew about the birds and the bees and who told her, but decided not to ask.
“Is it?”
I thought for a moment. “Pretty much.”
“Tell me.”
“What do you care?”
“I just care, is all.”
There was no way out of it. “Okay, here’s the deal. Seventeen days in the egg, five or six weeks of childhood, and then they’re on their own. Married for life at six months. They’ll go fifteen, twenty years together, if nothing happens. Hell of a thing, huh?”
“Aw, that’s sweet.” She appraised the sleeping squabs. “How can you tell if they’re old enough? You know, for marriage?”
I reached in and took out one of my prize cocks, a Hollander I’d named after Monk. He was nesting with his mate, a hen called Hilda of course, and a couple of their brood. He stirred a little in my hands, but I soothed him with a couple of strokes and he took to snoozing again. “Here’s how you tell.”
Gently I lifted up his right wing and exposed the full feathers beneath. “See that? Them feathers means he’s at least four weeks old.” I put his wing back in place. “In Monk’s case you know he’s at least six months old on account of he got Hilda and they got babies.”
I replaced Monk in his c
ote and picked up one of the hens. “Look.” I raised her wing, and her pinfeathers were clearly visible. “Sissy’s too young for much of anything. But this cock, Arthur”—I took another bird, a brother, a few days older—“he’s never flown.”
“I wish I was married,” says May out of the blue. Even though it wasn’t cold she was shivering just a bit, so I put my arm around her as she looked at the lights, which were starting to pass in Manhattan for stars.
I pretended to look out over the rooftops, Arthur asleep in my grip. “Why would you want to go and do something silly like that? You know how much Ma needs you. Marty too.” I gave myself a mental pat on the back. “I’m the only one who’s got a future around here.”
Right away I wished I hadn’t said that, and that goes double for right now, but one of the things about life is what’s done is done and there’s no taking it back.
“I’m almost sixteen. All the other girls got fellas. You want I should be an old maid?” She looked sad. “Besides, why shouldn’t I? You got plenty a girlfriends. You got Freda—”
“She ain’t no real girlfriend.” Pretty much true.
“—and I seen you making goo-goo eyes at her chum Margaret Everdeane—”
“You have not.”
“Have too. And I hear that Loretta Rogers is sweet on you.”
“That cow?”
“That’s what she’s been saying to some of the girls.”
“You’re dreamin’.”
“I hear things.”
“You hear too much.”
“I listen. Try it sometime, why don’t you?”
I decided to change the subject. “See that?” I said, gesturing at the city. May nodded and pulled a little closer to me. “They got rules, same as us, only better than us. ’Cause their rules make sense and ours don’t.”
“What kinda rules?”
“About how to behave. What to do, and suchlike. You know—a code.”
May’s eyes searched my face by the faraway glow of Broadway. “Everybody’s gotta have rules. Otherwise, it’s nothin’ but a jungle.”
Arthur’s gray head was nestled against my left thumb. I liked the way my birds trusted me.
“It is a jungle,” says I. “But even jungles got rules, and we don’t know ’em.” I swept my free hand out over the city, the way I sometimes did when I was alone and could pretend it all belonged to me. “I mean, why are they out there, having fun, and We’re stuck up here?”
“ ’Cause they’re somebody.”
That made me mad. “At my age I oughtta be somebody. I mean, look at that dope Goo Goo what runs the Gophers. I’m smarter than him.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell ya,” May said, like I was the dopey one. “With the Moses stuff. You’re the fella who can lead the Gophers to the Promised Land. Not just the Gophers either.”
Maybe I was a little dopey right then, because I still didn’t get what she was saying. “They’ll never let us off Tenth Avenue if they can help it.”
“So we get off ourselves.”
Now I was getting it. “We fight our way off.”
“Just takes a little cooperation is all. Teamwork.”
“And a few rules. Like treat everybody on your side square.”
“The golden rule is what the nuns call it.”
“Never tell the coppers nothin’.”
“Makes sense.”
“If they bust you, deny everything.”
“You might be innocent,” said May. “Or at least not too guilty.”
“If they’ve got proof, say it don’t prove nothing.”
“Tough to really prove things.”
“If they’ve got a witness, persuade him otherwise, or make a monkey out of him.”
“It’s him or you.”
“If they try to get you on the stand, refuse.”
“What if they make ya?”
“Say you can’t remember nothin’.”
We were really having a good time now. “What if the judge or jury ain’t seein’ things your way?” asked May.
“Find out where they live.”
“A bribe or a beating?”
“Whichever works best.”
“And if somebody double-crosses you?”
“Cut him dead,” I said.
“Without a second thought,” she said. “Just one more thing. Never, ever—”
“Rat,” I said, finishing.
She smiled at me. “Maybe if you’da gone to St. Mike’s School every day, the way you pretended to, you’da thought of this before.”
“The Catholic jug was plenty school for me. But you know things.”
She nodded. “Plenty of things. That’s why…” Her voice got tiny, like her. She took a deep breath, which, even in the dark I could see made her pretty little bosom swell. “You need me.”
“Of course I need you. Everybody knows that.”
“Then why don’t you—”
She started to say something, then stopped. In the distance, way beyond the city and the East River, I could see the first faint glimmering of dawn over Queens. I watched it come up, with Arthur in one hand and May in the other.
“You sure do love them birds,” she said after a time. “Sometimes I think you love them more than you love me or Ma or Marty.”
“How can you say a thing like that? They’re just dumb animals.”
May squeezed my hand. “Sometimes, when you ain’t looking, I creep up here while you’re over at the coop, and I watch you with them. I watch you as you let them fly. I see the look on your face as you watch them take off, flutter a moment and then speed up into the air.” She paused. “Fly away, from this. I see how much you envy them their freedom.”
I looked at her. She’d obviously been planning to say this for some time, and me none the wiser until now. “But they always come back.”
“That’s why they call ’em dumb animals. Me, I’d never come back.”
She started tugging at me, leading me back inside. I realized I still had Arthur in my hand.
“Ain’t you gonna put him back to bed?” she asked.
I took Da’s knife out of my pocket. “I wanna show you something,” I said.
Very tenderly I forced Arthur’s mouth open with the tip of the blade. “When a cock’s crazy about a hen, he opens his beak. If she puts her beak inside his, that’s how he knows it’s true love.”
“Sorta like smooching.”
“They bob back and forth together for a while, getting a taste of each other.”
“I hear they call that French.”
“Whadda you know? Anyways, once they’re good and ready, the hen crouches down and the cock mounts her and that’s that…Ma’d wash my mouth out with soap if she knew I was tellin’ ya this stuff.”
She seemed offended I’d think her ignorant. “I hear things. I listen. I learn.”
“Okay, here’s all you really need to know.”
I smacked the heel of my hand against the base of the knife, through the bird’s mouth and clear into his brain. Arthur never knew what hit him.
“That’s what I’d do to any mug what tries to get fresh with you,” I said.
For a moment we stood there on the roof of 352, looking at each other and knowing that we’d just made a covenant. I’d half expected her to cry out and weep for the dead bird, who after all never did nobody any harm; but she stood there silent. I held out my hand to her and she slipped hers inside mine.
“What are you going to do with him?” she asked at last.
I threw the body over the roof, down the air shaft, to take its place with the rest of the refuse. “The hell with him,” I said.
Chapter Sixteen
“Goo Goo,” says I the next day, addressing himself. His boys, Newburgh Gallagher and Marty Brennan, were sitting right beside him, doing nothing in particular. “I got an idea.”
“Yeah, whuh?” burped Goo Goo, downing the last of his morning beer. Goo Goo was not what you would call a fine specimen o
f a man. He had sandy blond hair and nonexistent eyebrows, which gave him the look of a circus freak, although no one would have said that to his face, such as it was. For Goo Goo, like most of us in those days, would beat a man to death as soon as look at him, so hair-trigger was his temper. I had always looked upon him as Happy Jack without the grin and minus the brains.
Gallagher and Brennan, who were as matched a set of Irish dumbbells as ever was, were giving me the fisheye as I spoke. Their job was to prevent any attack upon the person of the chief, but I always had the impression that neither would mind very much if some misfortune befell the boss.
I poured some more beer for all of them. It was warm, but it didn’t seem to matter. “Yeah,” says I, “a real good one.”
Loretta reached out and squeezed my hand as I started to talk. May was right: she was my new girl. I had grown tired of Freda, who was always after me to get her more swag, and Freda had grown tired of me, on account of my getting her best friend, Margaret Everdeane, into a compromising position or two, which meant that both Freda and Margaret were now mad at me. A whole fleet of gangsters mad at you was preferable to a dame or two, to which wisdom I should have listened.
“Owney’s ideas is always good,” chirped Loretta, whose real name was Dorothy, which she never used, and her last name was Rogers, which she was more or less stuck with. Why she was called Loretta I hadn’t the slightest idea and never asked. Loretta was quick-eyed, dark-haired, with dainty wrists, ruby lips and, even at sixteen, a full bosom, which I was always fond of. She lived over on Eighth. “You mugs oughta listen to him.”
I figured my forthcoming motion stood a pretty good chance of success even before I made it.
“Whadda we done lately?” I asked by way of preamble. Brennan scratched his bollocks and Gallagher cut one, which was about as eloquent as either of them ever got. “Nothin’ is what,” answers myself. “And sure if it isn’t time we did.”
Goo Goo cast one of the eyes that wasn’t on Loretta’s headlights in my direction. As undisputed lords of the West Side, the Gophers were ready for some action and any chief that didn’t give it to them, and right quick, wasn’t going to be chief for very long. Because there’s nothing a gangster hates worse than boredom, just as there’s nothing he’d rather do than lie around unless there was a fight brewing. Which is exactly what I was counting on. “You got sumpin’ in mind?” asked Knox, widening one rheumy eye.
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