It was an ironical summer packed with powerful images that I would never forget. Many mornings I spent with Marty and Bloomgarden planning the new production and meeting actors for the remaining parts, or in Boris and Lisa Aronson’s Central Park West apartment studying his endlessly revised set designs for the two plays, my soul only half there, but still exhilarated with life and at the same time ridden by guilt, a spinning whirl in my head, a drunkenness with the blasted, limitless beauty of existence. In the late afternoons I would be out in Brooklyn, in the Bay Ridge hotbox where I had attached myself to Vincent Riccio, who was teaching me how to maneuver in an area exploding with some of the worst violence in the city. The summer nights were the best for war, and the mindlessness of it all somehow reflected my own humbled pretensions to an ordered life.
The part of Bay Ridge where Riccio was based was a white slum made up of Irish, Italians, and some families of German and Norwegian background, and the houses did not look bad from the street. The vast black ghetto of Bedford-Stuyvesant was not far away, but race conflicts were not the problem. Occasionally, in fact, black boys would take long subway rides to join in a white rumble, just to see some action when things got too quiet back home. Of course, all-black gangs were warring with each other no less than the whites were, and for no better reasons. The strife was so bewildering partly because it seemed utterly profitless; a tall, good-looking black eighteen-year-old, a physician’s son from the Bronx, who had traveled all the way to Bay Ridge to join a fight, simply shrugged when I asked him why and gave me an opaque look edged with contempt for my powerlessness to penetrate his mind. They drew a certain perverse sense of dignity from the very purposelessness of their wars, a gallant kicking over of society’s tables of loss and gain. The spirit’s logic was the mind’s irrationality.
With Riccio my guide, it was not hard to map what from the outside seemed a sealed-off jungle. Fairly soon it was obvious that tribal organizations with boys instead of adults at their head were being substituted for weak or absent fathers. These youths had reverted to an age of chivalry whose misread pennants fluttered in their confused heads. But they were not without pathos. The gang had its president, treasurer, secretary of war—a government in miniature, but one based on respect, especially for their leaders, rather than on any material motive. In America they believed in nothing, in the gang they doubted nothing. Guys might suddenly decide to go over to Fulton Street to rob some passerby on the street, but they went as individuals, not as gang members, and did not look for gang support in these forays. As gang members they were a shadow military who saw themselves fighting for something like honor and the sublime spoils of victory. The problem, it soon seemed to me, was that in trying to suppress these gangs society had assumed that gain was the only real motive for human action, while the gang, albeit in a distorted and desperate way, considered itself useful to the community. The gang members longed for pride; money was something each would try to get on his own time. Like all idealisms, theirs made it difficult to figure out what they really wanted and what would satisfy that want.
A former slum kid himself, the youngest of twenty-one brothers and sisters brought up in respectable poverty, Riccio understood this. In his mid-twenties, he was a graduate of St. John’s, a subway university, had no advanced degrees or prospect of earning any, and at least in his own mind was in a demeaning conflict with the more intellectually sophisticated leadership of Mobilization for Youth, which was administering this infiltration program. He had boxed as a lightweight in the navy—“where I won my dentures,” as he put it—and his handy combination punches more than anything else had won him respect among the boys. His approach was theoretically simple: “They’ve got no fathers, so I’m the role model, so they keep testing me for the soft spot where I cave in to their threats or join in some gang bang. They’d like me to turn phony on them, and at the same time they secretly hope I don’t; it’s like you’d like to be good without you have to stop being bad.” And so there was a keen tension between their incipient cynicism toward him and a touching hope for their own salvation through his example and help.
Riccio had a very fine line to walk between his roles as society’s representative and the boys’ trusted ally. The police had never really accepted Mobilization’s demand that its street workers not be required to divulge knowledge of a crime, although there had been an agreement on that touchy point. In effect, the police wanted the street workers to act as informers, something that clearly would crush the boys’ confidence in them. Some individual cops understood and respected this confidentiality, but most resented it; it gradually eroded, and for this among other reasons the program was eventually undermined.
A tide was turning in 1955, and one felt it even then: for one thing, it was the first time narcotics were noticed in the neighborhoods, though I thought this only symptomatic of a wider but impossible-to-define disorientation that far transcended the gangs. One evening at dinner with Jim McCarthy and Mobilization’s chief theoretician, Richard Cloward of the Columbia University School of Social Work, the question arose as to how this generation of youth differed from our own of the thirties. We were sitting in a spaghetti joint on the Lower East Side next to a housing project where a particularly destructive outbreak was taking place. Fires were being set in hallways, elevators sabotaged, windows smashed, feces strewn on stairways. But relatively few attacks were directed at people. The police were overwhelmed and had asked McCarthy to come in and make suggestions, since he by now had had some publicity as Mayor Wagner’s troubleshooter on youth problems.
Tall, overweight, and cheerful, now and then wearing a baseball cap when he approached the gangs, McCarthy was quick to laugh, but his rather innocent Irish eyes never lost their seriousness; during a conversation, he would keep nodding and saying, “Right, right.” He thought there was some connection between the vandalism and events of the past few months in the project. A tenants’ union had been organized, with committees that were put in charge of keeping order on each floor, the members visiting families whose kids were troublemakers and generally acting as adjudicators of disputes between one apartment and another. It had been working very well until the district’s state assemblyman launched an investigation of the union as a Red front and within a short time managed to disband it, scaring off the membership. The political organization of the buildings, Jim theorized, had lifted the morale and sense of responsibility of the tenants, many of them menial workers and some periodically unemployed. Of course it was understood among us at the table that Mobilization, a city agency, could hardly come to the defense of the tenants’ union, which indeed might be a left-led organization, even if in this instance it had done socially useful work. What, we wondered, could substitute for it? The Democratic and Republican parties were hardly about to organize tenants’ committees in housing projects; it wasn’t their style. In a word, this particular outbreak, and perhaps some others, could be traced to the frustration of self-expression.
The depoliticalization of the project led to the broader question of what social ideals would be moving people in the immediate future, for the fifties were baffling, a time, at least so far, without a dominant accent or form. The three of us had grown up during the Depression, when it had been all but impossible to think of one’s individual fate apart from that of society. The rise of this obscure tenants’ union seemed like a throwback to a perfectly normal and ordinary reaction, thirties-style, of a community of people caught in a common problem—namely, to deal with it by mutual action and responsibility. It might well be that Communists were behind this union, but if collective action itself was to be forbidden, then collective responsibility would obviously have no community support, and things would inevitably end with every man for himself and desperate phone calls to the overwhelmed or indifferent police.
We sensed that we were at the edge of a gulf that would have to be crossed. “If common action of this kind is out, how are people going to visualize their evolution?” I asked Clowa
rd in particular, since he was more the theoretician than McCarthy or I.
“The question is going to be lifestyle,” he replied.
I had never heard the expression before. “What’s that mean?”
“There will be competing styles of life, symbolic and essentially meaningless differences in clothing, speech patterns, tastes in food, cars, and so forth. The class struggle is over for now, and maybe even the conception of rank-and-file organizing. People are less and less interested in common action, which even now is getting to seem strange and kind of pointless. Identification will be more and more in terms of style—the self-image will be politically neutralized that way. It’s going to be style-conscious, not class-conscious.”
It seemed an empty idea to me, but it returned to mind early one evening in July when I saw Billy, a boy I knew, slumped in a Bay Ridge doorway, unconscious. He was one of six children of a longshoreman, Tommy Flaherty, a small man who lived with his family above a bar and who loved to stand out on the sidewalk and challenge anyone who showed up to a footrace around the block. He never lost, even against young guys. His fast feet were his pride. More than once I saw Billy and his older brothers forcing their father upstairs against his will because his childishness was an embarrassment to them, and for the sake of their mother, a startlingly lovely and dignified woman now nursing her sixth infant. They were a handsome family, blue-eyed and flaxen-haired, the boys tall and straight, and Margaret, the mother, a proud woman still in her early forties. Billy was the apple of her eye, the one who had never stolen and never been arrested and seemed destined, with his delicate hands and fine features, for something like his uncle Raymond’s career as a successful stockbroker on Wall Street, whose clean towers across the bay could be seen beyond the end of the street.
To me, as to his friends, Billy’s behavior during the past weeks had begun to seem weird; he had become furtive, with an absent look, and no one could understand his sudden transformation. Then he began disappearing when the gang went to war, and it was finally realized that drugs—once they had learned he was on a drug—made a guy useless to them. Beer was something else, it unshackled you sometimes, but heroin encased a man within himself. Of course it wasn’t a question of their disapproving of narcotics but a matter of the practical loss of a good fighter. Narcotics menaced even their subculture with its ultimate privatism, and they consciously understood the threat quite soon. My memory of this in the sixties made it seem untrue and absurd when the new revolutionaries began touting drugs as a challenge to society and a pathway toward liberation.
Billy died of an overdose, the result either of poor information or of despair, but hardly of protest, I thought; it was an end still so novel that it did indeed seem arbitrary. Its fundamental pointlessness, the unredeemed waste, connected with Cloward’s speculation about “lifestyle,” how accurately I could not yet fully understand. At Billy’s wake, in the family’s small apartment above the bar, his beautiful mother sat with her youngest infant on her lap, staring into space with a fixed dead smile and neither bitterness nor anger in her eyes, for she was beyond those feelings. The sons, all in their best clothes, sat sighing with boredom but protective of their mother, while their father, his performer’s instinct fired up as he faced the little crowd of a dozen or so mourners, went around showing off a new tie he had bought for the occasion. He leaned over me, stroking it. “Like the tie, Art?” His ineptitude clouded his sons’ faces with hopeless pain. In his open coffin Billy looked his old surprised self, with skin too fair to bury and a face hardly marked by his eighteen years. I would not have been able to believe then that he was only the first victim of a scourge.
After three or four weeks in the streets with the gangs, I became cautiously optimistic about being able to write a film script. For one thing, I loved their mangled English. One burly Italian boy, nicknamed Mungy, had a sweet nature and masturbated incessantly. He was happy to show his immense penis to anyone who asked, like a valuable gift that some stranger had unaccountably handed him on the subway. That spring, along with some thirty other boys, he had been bussed up to a YMCA camp near Peekskill—their first time out in the country. Here, where they were immeasurably safer than down in the neighborhood, they were frightened of being alone and insisted on sleeping several to a cot. Mungy alone seemed content, as though his penis were company enough, wandering off by himself to peer up at a bird in a tree or lose himself staring at the running brook. There he captured a large painted turtle and tied a string around its neck, waiting patiently for it to move and taking a few steps at a time beside it as if it were a dog on a leash. Looking up at me, he said, “I’m commutin’ with nature.”
The YMCA camp was normally closed so early in spring but had been especially opened for the gang’s weekend at a time when no other children would be there, the management having been apprised of the boys’ reputation. Gang boys in Harlem in the twenties had usually been pretty good athletes, and I expected the same now, but when these boys managed to hit a ball they were breathless by the time they got to first base and had to lie down. In the lake they floundered about, none daring to go out over his head, and they refused to play the outfield except in a mob of half a dozen at a time, afraid of derision should they miss a fly ball. They would protectively conceal whoever missed the catch, even here moving together like a gaggle of geese.
A busload of girls from some middle-class Manhattan school showed up unexpectedly, and the camp manager quickly summoned Riccio to tell him to get the gang on its bus and out as fast as possible. But Riccio guaranteed him peace and tranquility, which I thought was distinctly in danger when the girls suddenly appeared around the swimming pool, bursting out of their skintight swimsuits. Rape was one of the occasional sports the gang indulged in, and I glanced around for signs of trouble. The gang had magically disappeared, and the pool was entirely given over to this female visitation. Imagining a council of war going on, I went off looking for the boys. Only a few yards into the surrounding shrubbery, I found them crouching like a band of frightened aborigines on an uncharted island peering out through the foliage at incredible invading creatures. I had never seen them so serious, so awed, as when a girl made a high arching dive from the board, followed by others slanting into the water in racing form and speeding up and down the length of the pool. Here were two civilizations, divided between those who could breathe and those who could barely do so, between the fed and trained and the deprived and ashamed.
From life on the streets to Marilyn high in the Waldorf Tower was a cosmic leap, but not such a discontinuity as it would seem. Of course it was strange for me to see boys in the Bay Ridge candy store staring hungrily at some photo of her in today’s News when I knew that I would be telling her about it in a few hours, but she was no stranger in spirit to what was happening down below. Movie stars’ salaries were beginning to take off now, but hers was fixed by an old contract, and she had the resentment of a revolutionary. In her long fight with Fox for the freedom to make her own films, she positioned herself against the studio’s exploitation of her popularity, which had been soaring over the past couple of years. What she thirsted for was not so different from what the gang boys so ineffectually plotted and fought to win, a sense of self-respect in a world that called them zeros. She could hardly find a sentence in any piece about her, even those written in praise, that was not condescending at best, and the majority seemed to have been written by slavering imbeciles who liked to pretend that her witty sexuality marked her as little better than a whore, and a dumb one at that.
Now that I knew her somewhat better, I began to see the world as she did, and the view was new and dangerous. We were still a decade and a half away from the end of the sixties, and America was still a virgin, still denying her illicit dreams, still living up to some standard image of the pure and the real. When a calendar of nude color photos of Marilyn was discovered, the studio went berserk, spinning off one plan after another to squelch it, even frantically pressuring her to deny that
it was she who had posed for the pictures. Instead, she calmly confirmed that she had needed the money and that that amazing body was indeed hers, her most precious possession, in fact. Though the hurricane quickly receded and she was even admired for not running for cover, she knew down deep that hypocrisy was the order of the hour and that she had not ceased being its target.
Marilyn lived in the belief that she was precisely what had to be denied and covered up by the conventional world. She did not expect that to change. But when I began to know her she was just starting to attract the public’s curiosity and sometimes its affection, and this made her tentatively imagine that she might somehow create a rooted, respectable life. She relied on the most ordinary layer of the audience, the working people, the guys in the bars, the housewives in the trailers bedeviled by unpaid bills, the high school kids mystified by explanations they could not understand, the ignorant and—as she saw them—tricked and manipulated masses. She wanted them to feel they’d gotten their money’s worth when they saw a picture of hers.
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