by Sol Stein
We think it is unfortunate that the law requires everyone to attend school up to age seventeen. It means that those of us who are trying to learn something are interfered with all the time by greasers and their like, who are just passing time.
We are addressing this appeal to the parents of this community to help us, because the teachers can’t. It is a fact of life in many communities throughout the country that the teachers have no control over the divided situation. The few really good ones give up and go elsewhere. The majority of teachers are afraid and do nothing.
We are afraid also, but we want to do something about the situation before we become adults. The reason is that adults are afraid or don’t care. Adults are hypocrites. If any student who wants to find a pusher can find one why can’t the teachers or the police or the adults find them? The answer must be that they don’t want to. If students have to pay protection money to greasers in school, let us remember that they see adults doing the same thing because it is easier to pay protection than to risk anything.
We know we are taking a risk by signing this letter. Actually, we were turned down by nearly seventy students who approve of what we’re doing but who didn’t want to sign this letter. If we are taking a risk by signing, who can say it isn’t a risk worth taking?
Leon Abels
George Crockett
Elizabeth Crowell
Dominick Deluria
Fred Frankel
Lila Hurst
Edward Japhet
Inge Jansen
Abraham Lefkowitz
Bertram Lilo
Kevin Mooney
Chisholm Motherwell
Edgar Motherwell
Thomas Olafsen
Morey Ruff
Sheldon Summerville
Patricia Toombs
Richard Tubbs
That evening, Paul Urek sat in his living room after dinner, skimming the evening paper. He checked the front page, sports, what was playing at the local movie houses, and then his eye lit on the letter, which was on the page facing the editorial page. Normally he would not have read a letter in a newspaper, but the long list of names caught his eye, and when he saw Ed Japhet’s among them, he read the letter, quickly the first time, then more slowly. He got up and put the paper down in front of his wife and son, pointing.
“Son of a bitch,” he said, “they’re talking about us.”
Chapter 21
Paul Urek climbed into his blue Chevy coupe, glancing as always at the odometer, the numbers now at 82,991, deriving the familiar good sensation from the knowledge that he had disassembled and reassembled practically every part of that car, that he had personally replaced, as they wore out, muffler, tailpipe (twice), rings, carburetor (rebuilt by himself), starter, shocks (all four), radiator belts, brake linings, everything but the transmission, which, thank God, hadn’t needed major work, that on his wheeled creeper he had checked, lubed, rechecked, drained, then, standing up, refilled the oil, pampered, anticipated, refined, sandpapering body spots, applying filler, sandpapering again, spot painting, then Simonizing all over with paste, not liquid wax. He’d dare his friends to find the nicks.
Sixteen years ago the car and his son were both brand new. He had watched his wife change the diapers and had tried it in front of her, laughing at his clumsiness, but after that first time he didn’t like the mess of it when, instead of pee it turned out to be a near-loose yellow crap he had to get unloaded into the john without spilling, and hoping the kid wouldn’t fall off the bassinet in the meantime. When the baby was to be fed, he tried several times to take a turn at it, but the little bastard kept letting the stuff dribble out of the mouth at about the same rate that he was shoveling it in. Finally, after junior had sideswiped a nearly full jar of strained carrots onto his father’s suit pants as well as the chair, he decided it was time to make a clear division, and he told his wife, “You feed and change the kid, I’ll take care of the car,” and since he didn’t take any back-talk from her, that was that.
He had asked for and gotten each empty Gerber’s jar for cotter pins, tacks, nails, wood screws, machine screws, brass screws, lock washers, and other small whatevers so they’d be neat and handy to the grasp whenever something needed fixing. He’d bought the Chevy when his wife had announced she was pregnant, and for nearly seventeen years now he had nursed and tended it, brought it to its present proud state as the cleanest, smoothest-running, most trouble-free automobile owned by any of his friends, including, he laughed to himself, Scarlatti’s year-old Mercury lemon that still wasn’t working right.
Paul Urek’s touch was gentle as he lifted the gear lever into neutral, turned the key while his toe applied minimal pressure to the pedal, and listened for the instant hum of the smooth start he expected and got almost all of the time. He put the car into reverse, backed out of the driveway, checking oncoming traffic both ways, then slipped the gear lever into drive. With the comforting, automatic shift into second, he picked up speed on Route 9, satisfied at the shift into high, no jolt, smooth, from a car with—he glanced at the odometer again—82,992 beautiful miles on it, a delight.
Paul Urek saw the light turn yellow, glanced quickly in his rear-view mirror to make sure he didn’t have a tailgater ready to go up his ass, and braked just as the light turned red. He’d nearly lost his license for three infractions during one eighteen-month period long ago, and his desperation at the time that he wouldn’t be able to drive nearly drove him insane. Luckily, the judge gave him one more chance, and since then he hadn’t had a ticket.
It was a long light. When he had briefly had a job at the wire works and joined the union, he had gotten the booklet which described the grievance procedure. That night, thinking about the booklet as he dozed off to sleep, he had dreamed about every goddamn grievance he had against the world, until he woke at two A.M. and couldn’t really get back to sleep before dawn. He hated the roustabout nature of his work, not knowing what to do when a good job was heard of and then lost to someone else, hated the penny-counting, no-chance-to-save round of buying the first and second television set on time, converting the boiler to oil because coal was hard to come by and his wife kept pushing, then the clothes washer and dryer combination, which was just no damn good, and he finally gave up on getting less than a third of what he had paid for it and putting that down on a separate washer and dryer from Sears, who had gotten very tough about delays on the monthly payments. He was furious every time he saw the hole in the new counter for a dishwasher. He had wanted to buy it for cash to avoid the chance of his credit application being turned down and ended up not buying because he couldn’t get his hands on that much cash and, furthermore, he’d be damned if he’d be beholden to the dishwasher-repair service coming in every few months, as he’d heard, for this and that costing twelve to fifteen dollars, lifelong servitude he didn’t need and want, and wondered now, as many times before, if Japhet worried about these things. It wasn’t fair that Japhet, whose schoolteacher income couldn’t be all that great, looked as if he never had to worry about bills, shoes that must have cost twice what his work shoes cost and lasted half as long. People like that either had the money or knew something he didn’t know, and he didn’t see himself or his son ever getting out of that bind.
Cars honked behind him. The light had changed. He took off with a roar.
He parked in the bowling area parking lot carefully, not too close to any other car whose opening door could mar the finish on his while he was inside.
At the desk Al waved hello and reached for size tens, but Paul brushed away the offer of shoes even though, as a mark of long patronage and respect, the proprietor no longer charged him the twenty-five-cent rental fee. He wasn’t bowling tonight.
He used to come regularly on Friday nights like this, bowling with the same group, beering, living off a high he had reached some years back when he had for the first time in his life struck oil, a 299, luckily with the whole mob watching, stamping and applauding. His name had gone up on the boa
rd of perfect scores since Al always made the one-point allowance, on the assumption that anyone with his name on that board would never play at a competitive alley if he could help it. Then Urek had cut down and almost cut out his Friday-night appearances for a reason he would not admit: shortness of cash. His share of the game never came to more than a couple or three dollars, but the beer would go fast and could come to five or six, especially when a good mood or a series of strikes made him overdo the buying of rounds for others. He hated coming home high and going through the money routine with the old lady, who’d talk about how she had saved six cents here and seven cents there by careful shopping, and then he’d blown ten dollars on what? A night at the bowling alley?
Urek slapped a back and palmed a greeting all around. Scarlatti offered him one of the uncapped, still-chilled bottles of beer, which he accepted because he hoped he wouldn’t be around long enough to have to buy an exchange. He watched along with the others, kidding, laughing out loud when he was supposed to, wondering how many of them he could count on. Eldon’s kid was a friend of his son, and the father was okay, a riveter who worked the I-beams on office buildings in New York, fearless about walking on steel thousands of feet in the air without support, a regular Indian, which he might have been with those high cheekbones, and they kidded him about it. Feeney’s kid was also one of the gang, a coward according to his son, but the old man was all right, a twenty-year teamster who could handle big ones, including a two-trailer rig. Corrigan would do anything the rest of them did.
So when they were taking a breather, Urek asked if they had seen the letter in the newspaper. Scarlatti was the only one who had. Urek brought out the neatly folded clipping and opened it up on the table in back of their alley so that the others could read while he and Scarlatti fed the fire by pointing at the names on the bottom.
“Five of ’em are Briarcliff Jews.”
“None of our kids would sign a thing like that.”
“I make three Jews.”
“They change their names.”
“Crockett’s a nigger.”
“You sure?”
“Sure I’m sure.”
“There’s the Mooney kid.”
Mooney’s father, though R.C., was a traitor. He had worked a pump at the Sunoco station, then somehow got financed to a half-ownership position, no one knew how, and now talked about sending his kid, who got straight A’s and hung out with the Protestants, to Yale or Amherst! What shit! Mooney had had the nerve to keep coming to the alley—they all knew why, he had never learned to play golf—and one day they had paid their respects to his snobbery. Mooney had gone to the crapper, and four or five of them had waited until he got behind the booth door. Then they took turns pissing on the tile floor which slanted slightly so that the river of piss ran right into Mooney’s booth. They had waited and waited for Mooney to come out, but he had outwaited them, and they had gone back to the game, and after a while Mooney came out, avoiding their alley, finished his game with his stuck-up son, paid off, and left without a glance in their direction. Later that week, Eldon, goaded by the rest, had driven into the Sunoco station when Mooney was on, Eldon’s car stayed parked at the pumps for fifteen minutes while Mooney ignored it, taking cars that came after, till another customer, seeing what was going on, had laughed, and Eldon had gone caroming out of the station yelling he was going to report the station to Sunoco.
“Japhet put his name on it,” said Urek.
“Yeah.”
“I got an idea,” said Scarlatti.
“I bet I know,” said Feeney.
“Do Japhet’s garage.”
A garage hadn’t been done in town for nearly a year. The last time, none of the five had gotten to participate though some of their friends had. Somebody had crossed somebody else, and one morning had arisen to find that his weed-killer bags had been slashed and some dumped into other bags so you couldn’t tell how much of what was in what, and all of it useless unless you wanted to risk your grass—and the rotary nut had been loosened, which would have sent the blade spinning off when the machine was started up, though on that occasion the victim had checked everything carefully out of caution and had tightened the mower nut so that no one was hurt. The police, of course, said it must have been vandals, meaning teen-agers.
“Doing a garage doesn’t reach the kids,” said Feeney. “I was thinking of the new rec hall.”
Urek was quick to agree. He’d had the rec hall in the back of his mind all along.
“My kid was in there once,” said Scarlatti. “They got peace posters and all that Communist shit on the wall.”
They talked some more, had some more beer, let the plan build, went back to the game, which seemed less interesting now, decided finally to give up their lane, talked some more at the bar between beers, hashing out what they’d need to do the job properly.
When Corrigan said, “Well, we’re not going to write a letter to the paper, right?” they all laughed.
“What are we waiting for?” asked Urek.
The five took off in three cars, headlights on, tailgating each other like a short funeral procession.
The bartender at the alley was on the phone to Thomassy the minute they left. Mike was Thomassy’s favorite stool pigeon. Most people in town who got into trouble were bowlers, not golfers, and if Thomassy had had his tipoff man at the Sleepy Hollow Country Club bar, he wouldn’t have seen any clients out of it. Those people, on the rare occasions when they got into trouble and couldn’t sweep it under the carpet, used multiple-named New York City law firms to stand up for them. On the other hand, the people who bowled produced almost all of the first-, second-, and third-degree assault, manslaughter, and wife-beating cases, their offspring the car thefts and late-night break-ins that brought them to court in handcuffs, Thomassy at their side.
Thomassy tipped Mike the bartender enough to make Mike think of himself as a moonlighting staff member instead of a squealer. Mike had gotten so proficient he no longer reported bar talk that would lead nowhere. He knew the difference between mischief and trouble better than most cops. Thomassy was a good teacher.
“Scarlatti, Eldon, Corrigan, Urek, and Feeney, destination the new rec hall for a paint job,” he reported.
“You sure it was Urek?”
“These fellows is all regulars around here for years.”
“Was the kid with him?”
“No kids.”
“Why the rec hall?”
“A clip from the paper, something about a letter signed by a bunch of kids, make sense?”
“How much they have to drink?”
“They were pretty beery.”
Thomassy glanced at his watch. The kids would still be there. Did the rec hall have a phone? Would, the kids believe him? If Urek’s old man got in trouble with the cops, it’d kill his chances with a jury for the kid. If Ed Japhet got hurt again, it’d tear the case to pieces.
“You still there?” asked Mike.
“They know you know?”
“You know me, I serve drinks and I’m deaf.”
“Okay.”
“Yeah, well, maybe you’ll get a homicide out of it.”
Thomassy hung up on Mike’s chuckle. Within minutes he was speeding toward the rec hall.
*
The five men had to stop at two of their homes before they had enough supplies, a four-inch paintbrush for each of them, two half-full gallon cans of black paint, a steel rake for ripping, a hammer, a crowbar.
Corrigan wanted to add an ax.
“No axes,” said Paul Urek, clearly the leader.
“I got something better than that in back of the car,” said Corrigan, pointing to the five-gallon can of gasoline. “It’s full.”
“You leave that in the car,” said Urek. “The rec hall’s got houses on both sides. A fire would sweep the block. Besides, half the volunteer firemen are still at the alley, and you don’t want them to lose all their business tonight.”
The men laughed. Urek said,
“Let’s get moving. They close the place at eleven.”
Thomassy was racing up South Highland, anxious to get to the rec hall as far ahead of the men as he could, when suddenly a yapping brown mongrel darted off the sidewalk. Thomassy couldn’t swerve either left or right because of the oncoming traffic and the parked cars, so he jammed the brake to the floor, glad his seat belt was buckled because his body rose toward the windshield as the car screeched to a stop, rocking forward, and from the plunk and the hideous dog-cry he knew he had hit. No car was behind him. He looked left and right. Was it possible no one had seen?
He reversed the car ten feet till he could see the thrashing animal, which needed a bullet through its brain but Thomassy had no gun and didn’t dare phone the police. He shifted the gear lever and, with tires squealing, drove around the helpless dog and away from his first hit-and-run accident.
Outside the rec hall Thomassy mopped his dripping face with his handkerchief, feeling the sweat all over his back and chest and even inside his pants legs. But maybe he could make up for the hit-run with what he was about to do if God gave him the time.
The kids were startled to see Thomassy come in the front door. Adults rarely visited the place.
Thomassy peered into the throbbing noise of the large room. It was hard to see. The colored lights had some kind of device in front of them to make the colors seem to whirl and blob in random shapes on the kids dancing and on the postered walls. Thomassy scanned the dancers for a familiar face.