I could tell at once who they were. There were three of them. I marked them mentally, for watching. Never a back turned toward them. Never.
Yet I’d made it through the gantlet.
I thought the initiation was over.
I was wrong.
“You got two more parts to the initiation,” Pooch announced. They all knew it, but I hadn’t. I was too beat and too scared to realize what he was saying, but after a few moments I let it filter through, and my blood went dry in my veins. I wasn’t sure I could take two more tests of endurance like the one I’d just come through.
I suddenly had a vision of some poor little schmuck like Fish or Shit trying to make that gantlet. Yet I knew they must have, for they were in the gang, and I was only one-third of the way there. (I later found out the initiation rites were highly flexible; and that up until six months before I’d joined the gang, there had been hardly any initiation at all…merely a ritual of talking.)
I took in all the faces, and the looks on their faces made them something other than faces. They were masks, like the Comedia del’Arte; representations, rather than realities. They were a Roman Circus audience, waiting for a martyr to meet his lion.
They were a carny crowd waiting for the aerialist to take his dive, and kill himself. They wanted blood. They wanted to turn thumbs down on this particular gladiator, no matter who he was; they wanted blood.
“Well, come on, what’s next?” I demanded.
It was getting to me, now. I was becoming light-headed and weak from the sprint and tackle through the gantlet; what the next part might be, I had no idea, but it had better be non-strenuous, I thought, wryly.
“Pick a chick,” Pooch ordered. He made a negligent half-wave at the girls sitting around the room. There was no room for misunderstanding; he was telling me I was going to ball one of the gang Debs—either in full sight of the rest of them, or in private. But either way, I was now about to prove my masculinity to the group.
I cast a wide, slow look around the room. I knew, roughly, which girls belonged to certain studs. I also knew certain other girls—Flo was one of them—who were considered below-status for any sort of steady dating or affection, but who were perfectly acceptable for balling. But that wasn’t the sort of chick I was being ordered to pick.
This was a test in many ways. They were gauging my good judgment, my critical sense, my coolness, in fact. I had to pick a good-looking girl who was not a bum, who was not strongly attached to any club member, who wouldn’t give me a hard-time, but who would carry into her sexual meet with me all the qualities of a “good” girl, yet be hip enough to make me a steady chick.
I was, in effect, picking a gang-wife.
Of the fifteen or sixteen girls in the basement room, only five were known to me to be in the category—that tenuous, unspoken category—from which I would be wise to select.
There was a dishwater blonde named Midget (nickname derived from the size of her bosom) with whom I’d talked on several occasions. She liked me; I’d informed her it was my habit to call “dishwater” blondes, “sunshine” blondes, and one of God’s most attractive creatures. It was a great deal of snow, but she liked me. Her legs were very thin.
Pam and Lou were friends, went to the same school, lived in the same tenement, and generally double-dated; both were moderately attractive, in that flashy, too-tight-looking way teen-aged girls look these days. Lou wore her hair back in a pony-tail, which became her; her hair was as black as any shadow in that room. Pam was a brownette, but she’d done a few tricks with bleach, and had a streak of blonde incongruously snaking through the mouse-brown. Both were abundantly endowed, and both were taller than me.
Lights was the fourth girl, and she was out of the question. Not that she wasn’t good-looking, because if a person’s taste happens to run to the Coleen Gray-type girl, with thin, heart-shaped face, pointed nose and slim mouth, then she was, indeed, good-looking. My taste happened to run in other directions. Lights…was out. My taste ran.
It ran in the direction of the fifth girl, Filene, who was slim and about a foot shorter than myself, with fine, long fingers and a carriage far more graceful than any of the other girls in the neighborhood sported. She had somehow failed to pick up the hideous habit of scuffling her feet as she walked, a trait common to almost every other teen-aged girl I’d ever encountered, and particularly prevalent in the Baron Debs. She did not chew gum, her complexion was clear, she spoke gently, almost musically, when she spoke, and I had a flitting hunch she was a virgin.
Which was probably why none of the other studs had gone for her. They were used to getting their bed-action without too much fuss and nonsense, and her naïve purity stood out in that room like a light in the forest. She was in that class of girls known to easily-awed kids of the streets as “high-class.”
Her mother worked as a seamstress in the garment center of Manhattan, her father was a neighborhood hanger-on who did odd jobs, hauled ashes, drank sneaky pete and in general kept out of everyone’s way, except for the nights he’d scoot back to their apartment and try to seduce Filene. Failing that, he would rough up and ball his wife with a thoroughness that was legend in the turf.
And somehow, she had come through it all reasonably untouched.
“I’ll take Filene,” I said.
There were great animal grins from all around the room, and I saw the girl pale noticeably. So that was it. This was as much an initiation for her as for me; she’d known it was to come some time, and she had no idea whether I’d be kind or a slob, as so many of the others had been. I knew for certain, then, that she was a virgin.
“You get that room over there,” Pooch pointed, and for the first time I saw a door between two highboys. I moved toward it, and she joined me.
I had learned another lesson about morality in the gangs:
There was unbelievable laxity in the morality of the kids, but it was still tied up inextricably with the mores of the times. It was all right to ogle a naked photo of Jayne Mansfield, but it was not all right to ball your chick in sight of a bunch of grinning brother gang-members. It was okay to knock a chick up, as long as you did it on the sly, and only talked about it with adolescent braggadocio. It was permissible to get a little in the drive-in theatre, but on the street you don’t hold hands. It was fine to rough up a guy’s sister in the vestibule of their building, but not a word could anyone say about your sister. Mothers were sacrosanct to the words of anyone else, even if Moms was a tosspot lush with a thirst bigger than her brain. You could do anything at all, sexually, under cover, but it wasn’t decent to make it in public.
Orgies, mixed couples balling in the same room, sex with the lights on…all of it was taboo.
Filene moved toward me, and I opened the door. I went through first; it wasn’t a mark of strength to let a Deb precede you anywhere—even to her defloration.
I closed the door behind me.
The room said one thing: You’re here to make it.
There wasn’t a chair, a table, a washstand, a picture, a rug, a window, wallpaper, anything in that cell of horror. There was only a bed.
Filene stood across the room, her eyes invisible in the darkness, but I knew they were wide with expectation and fear. I heard her move, rather than seeing her, and the bed springs creaked as she sat down. I walked to the spot where I thought the end of the bed must be, and reached out. It wasn’t there. I moved forward till my hand touched the brass footboard. I could hear her breathing, deeply, regularly.
Okay, so there it was.
I had a choice. Either go all the way, and be Cheech Beldone, and get through this initiation, and write my book and forget I’d committed statutory rape…or fake out of it somehow and run the risk that every girl in that room had been briefed to report what happened in here, and if I didn’t come through as was expected they would either bounce me from the gang, or start to suspect something was wrong.
After all, I was a perfectly normal, sex-hungry seventeen-year-old ga
ng recruit. If I didn’t make it with Filene, she might be grateful as all hell, but I’d be tagged a kook, or worse, intolerably in that set, a homosexual. I didn’t really have much choice.
I moved around the bed. She stopped breathing for a long moment. “How old are you?” I asked.
“Sixteen,” she said. How softly.
“Jeezus,” I snorted. “Whyn’t I pick somebody who knew what was happening?” I got up and moved across the room, slouched against the wall. I was scared worse than her.
“I’mmm sssorryy,” she drew the words out, humming them, almost, as though they were impregnated with tears even as spoken.
“Forget it,” I said, “it isn’t your fault.”
We both knew what we were talking about, though neither of us had mentioned it.
“Listen, I—uh—I don’t mind. If it was Fish or Wally or Tarzan I wouldn’t like it at all, but you don’t look like them kids at all.” It was the most pathetic rationalization I’d ever heard. I wanted to get out of there immediately!
“Listen,” she said again, that pathetic twist in her voice, “I’m sorta in bad with them, too. I been in the Debs almost six months now and they, uh, they haven’t, I mean nobody’s—”
She left it hanging. What she was trying to say was They’re getting impatient with my holding out. I’ve got to give it to someone and if it’s going to you, please be gentle, please be kind. Please.
How do you equate morality, ethics, good or bad—in a pitch-black basement room with nothing but a bed and a pretty girl?
Sometimes the right things get done for the wrong reasons, and sometimes the wrong things get done for the right reasons.
I had a feeling she wouldn’t be alone when she cried, later.
FOUR
I was a full-fledged member of the gang, minus one. The third part of the initiation was how I performed in a rumble. But for now, I was a Baron. I could swagger with the rest of them.
I didn’t even have to learn the primer for gang kids; it was instinctive. Simple.
When he’s down, kick for the head and groin.
Never make it on the scene unless you’re shanked and the blade’s got seven inches on a quick switch.
Avoid cops. Play it cool.
There aren’t many rules in the primer for gang kids, but what few there are, all count. They’re all easily understood because they use a simple, sound philosophy: it’s a stinking life, so get your kicks while you can. The gang is home, the gang is mother and father and clergy and teacher; take what you want before some sonofabitch takes it first; tell them nothing—and don’t get caught.
And today, in the five boroughs of New York City, and all across half-sleeping America, wherever the Hell of the cities forces kids into the gutters, young toughs are applying those rules.
When they’re laughing at the authorities, they call themselves “the men,” or “the guys” or simply “we are juvies.” It’s short for juvenile delinquent, but there’s nothing short about the knives they carry, or the lengths they’ll go to in obtaining revenge. They revel in the notoriety they receive in newspapers and cheap periodical exposés. Then they try to outdo the fabricated fantasies of writers who have never been down there in the gutter, on the turf with the kids; writers who are doing more damage with their wild yellow-journalism than they can imagine.
Get it straight right now: these aren’t kids playing games of war; they mean business, bad business.
By now the kids are also aware of the potential dangers of the social worker and the honest reformer—they no longer trust them. When the gang counselor, youth worker, settlement attaché moves in, the rumbles cease, the kicks get less; oh, sure, there are less cats making it over from other turf on raids, and more policed dances, and the block cools off, but that only makes the scene that much more of a drag for them. So they tell the social workers what they want them to know, and keep the dark facts tucked into their boot tops.
Here are some of those dark facts.
The gang stud pays first homage to the club. He attends meetings religiously, he never finks on a brother member, he never crosses a member unless the circumstances are inevitable, and then, only under specified, almost formalized, conditions—equivalent to a duel. He is as ruthless as a Syndicate torpedo when those circumstances and conditions arise.
Armed combat in the world of the tenements is a make-shift thing. It is a field of endeavor that has allowed the old Yankee bathtub-inventor room to swing. While today a kid can mug a drunk and collect twenty-five dollars to buy himself a piece—a gun, that is—in New York it is still not the easiest thing to find a fence or a pawnbroker or a junk salesman or a gang pusher with that many pieces handy. So they invent their own weapons.
Forget the common utensils of destruction, the switch-blade, the ironwood chair leg club, the broken bottle, the blackjack made from dumping two dozen half dollars into a U.S. Army cushion-sole sock, the brass knucks made in shop class by agile hands. Forget them for the moment, they can’t be really classified as ingenious, nor can the lead pipes, the baling hooks or the sheath-knife carried behind the neck in an oiled case, so just discount them.
Consider for the moment such lethal weapons as the raw potato studded with double-edged razor blades. A perfect in-fighting tool used formerly by the Black Irish in their war with England, the kids have found it perfect for stripping the flesh from an opponent’s face. And if the fuzz bust the rumble, why, you just roll the weapon down the most convenient sewer opening. Lost: only an old potato and a quarter’s worth of Gillette blue blades.
Or how about that homemade cannon, the zip-gun, about which you’ve heard so much? Have you any idea how simple they are to make? Not the detailed and involved weapons made by kids who only want to sport a deadly-looking piece, but the quickly-made item to be used in a killing.
The tube-rod in a coffee percolator is the barrel. Did you know it’s exactly right for a .22 calibre slug? Or perhaps it’s not the stem from a coffee pot. Perhaps it’s a snapped-off car radio antenna. Either one will do the job. They mount it on a block of wood for a grip, with friction tape, and then they rig a rubber-band-and-metal-firing-pin device that will drive the .22 bullet down that percolator stem or antenna shell, and kill another teen-ager. What they don’t bother to tell you is that a zip-gun is the most inaccurate, poorly-designed, dangerous weapon of the streets. Not only dangerous to the victim, but equally dangerous to the assailant, for too often the zip will explode in the firer’s hand, too often the inaccuracy of the homemade handgun will cause an innocent bystander to be shot. It is a booby trap of the most innocent-seeming sort, and there are many kids in Brooklyn (or in Queens, Long Island City and Astoria, where the Kicks, another club much given to the use of the zip, roam) with only two or three fingers on a hand, from having snapped that rubber band against the metal firing pin.
But there are even more terrifying weapons, if one only takes the time to seek them out:
Garrison belts, with the buckles honed to a razor’s edge. Barracks boots with razor blades stuck between the toe and the sole, protruding just enough so that a fierce kick will slash the tendons of an opponent’s legs, render him a cripple. The Molotov cocktail—gasoline and a rag packaged in a large size Coke or Canada Dry ginger ale bottle. Blinding fuse-packets of potassium nitrate and powdered magnesium, gauged to explode in a magnesium flash when they are thrown into someone’s face.
The weapons of the gang kid have a charm all their own.
But more than that, gang warfare is typified by a callous disregard for Marquis of Queensbury rules, or for that matter, rules of simple decency. When they fight, they are amoral…totally without mercy…almost inhuman.
A cat that’s down is a cat who can’t bother you, man! Stomp him! Stomp him good! Put that lit cigarette in the bastard’s eye! Wear Army barracks boots—kick him in the throat, in the face, kick him where he lives. Smash him from behind with a brick, cave in his effin’ skull! Flat edge of the hand in the Adam’s apple! Use
a lead pipe across the bridge of his nose—smash the nose and send bone splinters into the brain!
And after it’s over, slip your switch or your piece to your Deb; let her shove it into her bra or garter belt, the waistband of her pants, to be carried boldly away from the rumble. The fuzz don’t search the chicks, they get away clean. Or play it cool, use the spud-and-blades bit and then heave the weapon down the nearest gutter.
No loss.
There’s grocery and drug stores on every block.
The young rocks of the Barons (or the Blooded Royals, or the Kicks, or The Jolly Stompers, or The Egyptian Dragons, or The Centurions, pick one) think very much alike. Their morals and language, their dress and weapons, they’re all much of a kind.
Imagination is a sometimes thing, but mimicry and the ability to pick up on something useful, to imitate what they have seen on television or in the movies, what they’ve learned from commando and judo manuals acquired through the mails, this is a talent well-developed in the gangs.
At one time the sincerest form of flattery was practiced so much, that each member of the Barons wore a black and gold basketball jacket, shiny satin, with the club name in bold script across the back, the wearer’s name across the pocket. But the Barons, as with most kid gangs these days, finally realized advertising was poor form. The nice shiny satin jacket with BARONS scrawled big across the back was a signpost to every cop in the turf. They realized it was easier to keep a gang swinging if the fuzz didn’t know they existed. So they made it mandatory that the jackets be hung away for good, and anonymity settled over the Barons, as far as ballyhoo was concerned, though the neighborhood knew who they were. It didn’t need to be advertised in the Amsterdam News—the people knew.
Memos From Purgatory Page 5