Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud

by Joe Pepitone

  “Mokey,” I said, “you think you’re sick of it. . . .”

  “Yeah, well you can take him, Pep. You got to stand up to him, fight him back. You can kick his ass.”

  “I don’t know, Mokey.”

  “I’m telling you, you can kick his ass. You just gotta do it once. He won’t bother you again.”

  “You know, Mokey, you’re right, goddamnit. I’m gonna do it!”

  So the next day we were at school and classes were over. But the shop class stayed open an extra hour for anyone who wanted to work on a project. You could make boats, lamps, tie racks for your mother. Mokey and I were passing the shop and Knucks was in there all alone.

  “Now’s your chance, Pep,” said Mokey. “You can get him!”

  “Jeez, I don’t know. . . .”

  Mokey got furious. “Go get him, goddamnit! You don’t hit that sonofabitch, I’m gonna hit you!”

  “Aw, shit, Mokey. Why don’t we go play some ball?”

  He hit me a helluva shot in the arm. “Ouch! Christ, Mokey!”

  “You hit him, or I hit you!”

  I walked to the shop door rubbing my arm and yelled, “Knucks—come out here!”

  He looked up from the bench he was working at, saw it was me, and said, “What the fuck do you want, jerk?”

  “Knucks—-I’m gonna fight you. I’m gonna beat the shit out of you!”

  He put down his project and walked straight toward me, and I was scared. I was so frightened I didn’t think I could throw a punch. But he walked right up to me, about eighteen inches from my face, and my fist just shot out, as if Mokey were controlling it with a string, and caught Knucks flush on the jaw. I didn’t think I hit him that hard, but he went down! He flopped right down on the floor! Holy shit! I jumped on him, grabbed him in a headlock, and squeezed. “You give?” I said. “You give up?”

  “Yeah, yeah!”

  “No, you don’t!” I squeezed harder, loving it. He was giving up to me! After all those beatings, I had him on the ground, choking the shit out of him! I wasn’t scared any more! I was winning! I was tough! I let him go, and when he staggered to his feet, I started pounding the hell out of him, hitting him as hard as I could: lefts, rights, in the gut, in the face, just whaling away.

  Then, a few days later, I’ll be damned if I didn’t win another fight. Two in a row! I was tough. I started going around looking for fights. Tall, skinny Joe Pepitone was not a guy to mess with. I beat up two of my good friends. Another friend, my cousin Paddy Boy, gave me some lip one day, wised off about something, and I punched him in the stomach so hard that he lay on the sidewalk gasping for breath for five minutes. When he got up, I said, “Don’t fuck with Joe Pep!” I felt mean, like I was the toughest sonofabitch in the world. I even started getting cocky with my uncles. And suddenly I had won five fights in a row—five! Me! Willie wasn’t going to have to worry about me coming home beat up any more. Shit, man, I couldn’t lose!

  If anybody said anything that seemed out of line to me, I came right back at them for the first time in my life. About three weeks after my victory streak began, a bunch of us were in the school yard playing stickball and this Irish kid was bugging me, acting kind of big. He was about my size, tall and skinny. I picked a fight with him. He grabbed the stickball bat and smacked me with it.

  “You wanna fight, huh?” he said, holding the bat.

  I danced around him, throwing punches, but I couldn’t get close enough to him to land anything. Every time I swung, he cracked me with the bat. Finally I started covering up, and he chased me around the school yard, leaving welts all over my body.

  I ran home and my mother saw I was bruised and bleeding. “Mom,” I said, “I tried to hit him, but he had a stickball bat!”

  “Get a baseball bat and get him,” my mother said.

  I got a baseball bat out of the closet, went back to the school yard, and ran right up to that Irish kid. He yanked the baseball bat out of my hands and beat the shit out of me with that.

  I went home and told my mother, “Mom, don’t tell me to get a gun, ‘cause he’ll take it away from me and shoot me.” That was enough of that fighting shit for me. I lost that one twice, maybe the next fight would be even worse. Five in a row wasn’t bad, after all. Why push it?

  In my neighborhood you had to belong to a gang or you’d get your ass whipped every day. You couldn’t go to Prospect Park, to a church dance, to the roller rink, even to school if you weren’t in a gang. I didn’t much like gangs, but I did like protection. I needed protection.

  We’d had a gang of twenty to twenty-five guys for years: The Washington Avenue Boys. All of a sudden one day Joe Fortunato, the leader, came over to me with a bunch of the other guys and said, “Joe, we’re gonna have to initiate you into the gang.”

  “What the hell do you mean ‘initiate into the gang’? I’ve been with you guys all my life!”

  “No, this is a new thing we’re starting, Joe. Make it official. The older guys have to initiate the young guys.”

  “Who initiated you guys?”

  “We initiated each other,” said Fortunato, who was a couple of years older than me and looked like Muggs McGinnis of the East Side Kids. He wore an old fedora hat pushed up in front just like Muggs in the movies.

  “Joe, it won’t be bad, it’s just a little test we’re putting all the young guys through. You won’t have any problem.”

  “What do I have to do?”

  “We’re just gonna tie you to a tree in Prospect Park tonight for four hours, then come back and set you free.”

  “Four hours! Me tied to a tree in Prospect Park for four hours! At night! No way.”

  Fortunato and the other older guys huddled a minute, then he said, “Okay, Joe, if you don’t wanna do that, there’s another test you can do to be initiated. All you have to do is swim halfway across the park lake.”

  “Halfway? Then what do I do when I’m out in the middle? How do I get back? You guys are nuts. I’m not gonna do any of this shit.”

  They huddled again. “Joe, you want to be in the gang or don’t you?”

  “Yeah, shit, you know I want to be with you guys.”

  “Okay, this is your last chance. Come on. The initiation will be held right in my house.”

  We all went over to Fortunato’s and they put a blindfold over my eyes in the living room. They told me to wait there, that they were all going into the bathroom for a conference. A conference? I thought. What the hell are they up to? As soon as I heard the door close, I lifted up my blindfold and saw that they were all gone. Then I heard them all coughing up phlegm and spitting in the bathroom. They went on for about five minutes, hacking and coughing and spitting. Then the door started to open, so I pulled the blindfold back down.

  Fortunato walked over to me and put a glass in my hand. “Okay, Joe, drink this,” he said,

  “Man, I'm not gonna drink that.”

  “Joe, you wanna be in the club, you gotta drink it.”

  “I wanna be in the club, man, but I can’t drink that shit.” I felt the glass in my hand, thinking about what was in it. “C’mon, man . . .”

  “Joe, it’s up to you, if you don’t wanna hang out with us any more.”

  “Aw, shit . . .” I thought about what it would be like, not having the guys to hang around with, not having any protection out on those mean streets. I lifted the glass toward my mouth and something sticking out of it jabbed me in the nose. “What the hell—?”

  “That’s a straw, Joe. You gotta drink through a straw.”

  I put the straw in my mouth and tried to hold my breath, but I couldn’t draw anything in at the same time. Fuck it! I thought, and sucked hard—and this thick, slimy gook filled my mouth and stuck in my throat. Then it came out, along with everything else in my stomach, all over Fortunato’s living-room floor. I ripped off my blindfold.

  “You no-good bastards! Making me drink lungers!”

  They were all laughing and slapping one another, and I looked at the
glass in my hand and saw that the end of the straw was buried in a raw egg.

  “Hey, you’re a member, Joe! You’re a member!” Fortunato was yelling.

  I was always a follower, never a leader. Not just because I was one of the younger guys, but because that was my nature. I went along with everything, not because I liked everything that went on, but simply because I had to in order to be one of the guys. I remember a couple of gang wars we had around the Fourth of July that were really crazy, I mean where guys got some really bad injuries.

  The wars started when one of our guys went to buy fireworks and got ripped off. We’d all chipped in a few bucks apiece for the fireworks, and they were sold in another neighborhood in which we had trouble with the guys who lived there. We had trouble with gangs every place around us, that’s the way it was. But our guy was careful, we thought: he took a taxi to the store that sold the fireworks, bought about forty dollars’ worth of stuff, and was carrying it out to the taxi he’d had wait for him—when six guys jumped him and stole the entire buy. Were we pissed off!

  So we scraped together over fifty dollars, and one of the guys got his uncle and a couple of other adults to drive him to the fireworks store. Then we challenged the guys who’d ripped us off to come into our neighborhood. We caught a couple of them alone, kicked their asses, and dared them to come back with all their guys. They did and we were ready. We had guys on the roofs with cherry bombs that you lit and torpedoes that exploded on impact. We also had filled garbage cans with the loose gravel that covered the tar on all our roofs. We had guys in alleys on the street with Roman candles. And we posted one guy on the roof of the building where our territory began, two blocks away, who as soon as he saw them coming fired a Roman candle to signal us. It was like a war.

  When they marched down the street where we were waiting, we threw down cherry bombs, torpedoes, and gravel. Our guys in the alleys jumped out and fired Roman candles at them from twenty yards away. They hit a couple of guys right in the chest and their shirts caught on fire. Shoes were blown off, pieces of fingers. You never saw anything like it. It scared the shit out of me and repelled me when I saw those guys running with their shirts on fire. But I had to be part of it, had to act tough, like I didn’t give a shit. If you didn’t throw your bombs or fire your Roman candles at the enemy, another guy in your gang would see you and tell everyone, and you’d be ostracized. It was a wild, crazy scene. I heard that one guy was blinded in one eye. I know we destroyed them. They dared us to come into their neighborhood for a rematch, and we told them to fuck off We said, you guys want to get even, come on back—and those stupid bastards did. It was just as bad the second time.

  I was lucky in the gang fights we had. I managed to stay out of the heavy brawling, pick out another skinny guy to wrestle with, just run around a lot. Until one night when I was about fifteen and a half. The trouble started at the Empire Roller Skating Rink. We were all there skating and laughing it up. A lot of the guys were fooling with the girls from our neighborhood, which was something I wasn’t into much at all. Not only did I look like a baby robin and didn’t get a whole lot of calls from the girls, but playing ball was my thing. Besides, my father made me be home every night at ten o’clock, and the girls stayed out later than that.

  This night at the Empire Roller Skating Rink there was a whole crowd of Puerto Rican guys who started coming on with our girls. There was almost a big fight right then. Instead the decision was to have a gang fight the following night in Prospect Park. If a fight had started at the rink, the police would have been there in minutes. Well, it turned out to be my last gang fight.

  They had a lot of guys, way more than we did, and four of them got me, held me up against a wall, and beat the living shit out of me. They broke my nose and I was a bloody mess, my white T-shirt was solid crimson in front. Even here I was lucky, because the brawl only lasted about two minutes. Somebody had tipped the police and about four squad cars came screaming in and everyone took off. If they hadn’t shown up so fast, I might have ended up crippled. Those Puerto Ricans were small, but mean as hell.

  We all ran in different directions but ended up back at the luncheonette we hung around, Eddie G’s. I went right into the bathroom in back to try to clean up. I soaked my T-shirt in the sink and wiped the blood off my face. My nose was blown up twice its normally considerable size, and I was having a helluva time breathing. I was standing there sucking in air through my mouth when I heard a door slam and a shout:

  “Where the hell’s Joe?”

  Jesus Christ! It was my father—who’d told me to stay out of gang fights or he’d kill me.

  “I don’t know where he is,” my friend Okie said.

  I heard a scuffling sound and found out later that Willie had grabbed my friend by the front of his shirt. “If you don’t tell me where Joe is, I’m going to punch you right in the goddamn face, you little bastard!” my father said.

  “He’s in the bathroom!” my friend yelled. “In the bathroom!”

  I turned and put the little hook through the eye on the door and stopped sucking in air, stopped breathing entirely. I wrapped my hands around the knob and braced my feet on the floor, leaning backward. The next thing I knew, I was flying out of the bathroom, sailing past my father—who had yanked the door so hard he’d ripped the hook out of the door—onto the floor. He grabbed me by the back of my T-shirt and twisted as he lifted me up. The neckband was cutting into my neck, choking me.

  My father pushed me toward the front door like that, where he stopped by my friend Okie and stuck a fist in his face. “And you’re tomorrow, you sonofabitch Irish bastard!” he said. “This is your friend and you’re supposed to watch out for your friends.” He pointed at my nose, which was bleeding again, the blood trickling down my cheek. “You’re dead when I catch you tomorrow.”

  He shoved me outside where my Uncle Tony was sitting in a car with the door open at the curb. My father spun me around and hit me a shot in the jaw that knocked me right into the car. Uncle Tony drove us around to our building, and the instant we got there my father threw me out on the curb. I scrambled to my feet and headed up the stairs as fast as I could. My father was right behind me, rapping me all the way. We had an old Bendix washing machine with the little window in front sitting at the top of the stairs. I stumbled on the next-to-last step. When I got up, my father punched me in the back of the head as hard as he could. I was half conscious when my head smashed through that Bendix window, shattering it but somehow not cutting me.

  That was the end of my gang fights. I swore that night as I cried myself to sleep that I’d never get into another gang war, never. And I didn’t. When the next one came up, I told the guys what had happened to me in the last one and said no thanks. It wasn’t worth it. I’d gotten destroyed in a gang fight in Prospect Park, then gotten double-destroyed at home. My father taught some hard lessons, but this one paid off for me. Hell, I’d been birthed with a big enough nose.

  III

  “What comes out is your essence.”

  My good friend Lemon, being older and wiser, taught me some very important things, too. When I was eleven he taught me how to jerk off. When we finished, I said, “Hey, what’s wrong? Why did that stuff come out of you? Nothin’ came out of me.”

  “Don’t worry,” he explained. “You’re too young to shoot. That stuffs ‘come’ and you’ll ‘come’ when you get a little older.”

  “When, Lemon, when?”

  “I don’t know . . . a few more months, a year.”

  “Shit.”

  When I was about twelve and had finally started to dribble a bit jerking off, Lemon had what we called “the hots” for a girl named Pat with great big breasts and a saucy mouth. Lemon was always fooling around with her: “I’m gonna get you.” “Yeah,” she’d say, “it might be fun.”

  One day he and I were coming out of The Itch and he spotted Pat leaving in front of us. “Hey,” he said to me, “my mom’s not home. I’m gonna ask Pat to come over to my h
ouse. I bet we’ll get a hand job.” We were always talking about getting a girl to give us a hand job then. We didn’t know how to fuck.

  Pat said sure, she’d go along with us to Lemon’s apartment. Lemon’s eyes got all watery, as if he couldn’t wait. We went into the hall in his building, and Lemon couldn’t wait. He reached over and put one of Pat’s hands on his dick and the other on mine. She smiled and started rubbing and squeezing.

  “Hey, Lemon, don’t you think we better go upstairs,” I said. “Somebody might see us.”

  We hadn’t even closed the door to his apartment when Lemon was unbuttoning the back of Pat’s blouse. She finished undressing herself and sat back on the sofa, smiling at our expressions—which were a mutually bug-eyed gape. What tits! I looked down at her thing, the first I’d seen with hair, and I thought, Wow, is that ugly! No part of me is going near that! I’d get a disease or something.

  Lemon was anything but put off and moved toward the sofa. Then we heard clomp, clomp, clomp on the stairs. ‘Oh, Christ,” he said, “my mother’s coming!” He ran over and locked the door, scooped up Pat’s clothes and threw them under the sofa, grabbed Pat’s arm, and said, “C’mon, quick—out on the fire escape!”

  “Are you crazy? I can’t go out there like this!”

  “Lemon, why the hell have you locked this door?” his mother yelled, knocking very hard.

  “Be right there, Mom!” he yelled, shoving Pat toward the window. I took her other arm and helped her up on the sill.

  “Lemon, what the hell are you doing?” His mother kicked the door. “Open this door!”

  “Hurry, get out there!” Lemon whispered.

  “People will see me!” Pat whispered as we pushed her out on the fire escape.