Memos From Purgatory

by Harlan Ellison

  …and I had the least dangerous weapons in that room.

  The social workers and gang supervisors had by this time gotten word of the rumble, of course. No one, not even a blind deaf-mute, could have missed the signs. The neighborhoods were alive with tension…no one was on the streets but strangers and fools…cars had somehow found ways of detouring around these sections. But no one could stop it. The police knew a war was about to break, but they didn’t know where, and the social workers were up against a brick wall. The squealers and adult informers had been warned about talking. This was one rumble the gangs wanted to come full force. It was the settling of many scores.

  As we armed, I thought about it, briefly.

  It’s better, I told myself. Don’t try to break it up, don’t try to stop it. A lot of cops and social workers will get hurt if you do. Let them throw themselves at one another, these urchins with death ready. Let them smash each other, and rip and blast, let them. Let them go at it till the blood mounts up in the gutters. They’re like army ants…no one can come before them and hope to stop them.

  The fight was inevitable: all their fights are inevitable, and if they aren’t handled under terms of war, where many will survive, they’ll do it with knives in the back and with homemade bombs in the schoolrooms, and many more will die. So let them alone. Let them kill each other.

  Maybe the sight of all that blood will one day stop them.

  Maybe, some day. But not today. Today was lost.

  It suddenly caught at me. I was one of them. The blood that ran might be mine. My philosophy went right out the window. Stop them, I thought! Stop them cold, before it’s too late. I couldn’t be bothered worrying about anyone else, then. I’d painted myself into a corner, and there was no way out.

  And right then, I didn’t have to play-act any more. I knew how the kids felt, with no way out of the mess.

  That close to a rumble, all of us, and only an act of God could prevent the thing from happening.

  And God didn’t seem to be interested in any of us poor slobs.

  NINE

  Prospect Park at ten minutes to eleven was pitch-black. They had broken most of the street lights. It was really dark. And the Park was teeming with gang kids. I had laid out my particular section of the battle plans, using a simple expedient of skirmishers right and left, with an advance force holding back center, just slightly, to allow the men on either side to encircle the Flyers coming at us. Fence had his flare gun and he was in the first rank with me. I had a feeling that weapon would be highly useful in lighting up the fighting area, once we’d engaged the enemy.

  We had come into the Park on foot, by a devious path, and I hadn’t been settled in the bushes for more than two or three minutes before a church bell began chiming the hour. The longest, slowest, fastest eleven strokes of a chime I’d ever heard.

  I can’t quite think of any other way to say it, except to reiterate that I was really scared. I’d come out here to write about this thing…not get killed in the middle of it.

  Fence was right beside me, belly-down in the dirt under that bush, the Very pistol held out stiffly before him, his hand steadying it, and its large round canister muzzle black against the darkness. Most of the others were together, save the skirmishers I’d sent out on either side. It was good gang psychology; not only did it keep the weaker wills from sprinting, but it buoyed up morale. Might is right, superiority in numbers. And yet, we had no idea how many the Flyers had been able to recruit.

  There were very nearly a hundred Barons spread out through that end of the Park, all hunkered down, waiting, waiting for something to happen. I scuttled around to look behind me, out across the Avenue, and saw the main part of the fighting force coming from behind a line of parked cars. This was how the War Counselors had set it up: plant the first wave in the Park ahead of time, and let the Flyers think the main batch was all we had.

  The chime struck for the last time, and the huge gang of Barons broke across the street.

  The Puerto Rican Flyers were ready for them.

  I had heard nothing till that moment, but now, even as the slap-slap of sneakers sounded on the street, the first shots exploded off to my right and I heard a high, adolescent voice scream in pain. Someone was a damned good sharpshooter. It had started.

  The pitch-black of the park was suddenly firefly alive with gunbursts and sparklers of flame. Most of the shots were going wild, but occasionally I could hear a thrashing and a coughing in the trees. Blood seemed to be drenching me, not sweat.

  Apartment windows had flown up at the first shots and cries, screams, bellows of rage floated through the bushes. The main force had taken to the underbrush. Someone in the buildings was shouting for the fuzz.

  Someone else was lying under a tree, clutching his chest and “Hail Mary’s” with bloody fingers and a swollen tongue.

  Beside me, Fence rasped, “Now? Now I do it? Huh, now?”

  I laid a hand down on his back to shut him up.

  Not yet.

  Let’s live a little longer. Don’t attract attention to us, for Christ’s sake. My eyes were filled with pinpoints of light. Shots, from everywhere. The night was alive with sound. Everywhere.

  I was consumed with a wave of panic. I was sorry I’d ever wanted to write about how street gangs operated. I was going to find out, in the field, but I might never live to write about it. It was no holds barred, and they liked that, as long as it was someone else who caught the slug in his throat.

  Fence leaped up and started running. I tried to stop him, but he was gone, into the dark, between the trees. And my legs were under me, too, and I was running, without mind, without thoughts, just running, with that bayonet hard between my fingers and my left hand covered by the steel knucks. But I hung back, and heard movement all around me as the main force went streaming and screaming past, right into the face of horror.

  First boy through the trees was caught in the eye by a long pole with a piece of glass taped to the end. His screams brought the rest running. A Deb dropped beside him and got a good look; it was her stud; she started screaming, trying to cram her fist into her mouth. I felt the adrenalin go squirting through me. I wanted to run with the pack!

  I wanted to kill, too!

  Like sharks smelling blood.

  Go!

  The zips came into play. Their sound was not as sharp and slight and clean as the rifles or hand guns. They had no accuracy, thank God, but even so, the danger was there. And I didn’t know what I was doing there, just running among them, swinging that bayonet and connecting with air, just air, but wanting flesh, wanting to carve someone up, seeing myself as a dark knight in the battle, doing the most basic thing a man can do…fighting. It took no brains to fight, and less to die, but I had no brains…I was a dark knight!

  A black shape heaved up out of a bush as I passed and murmured miera, come here, as I felt a blast of pain that numbed my right arm completely. I don’t know how I held onto the bayonet. I suspect I had to, that was why! I pulled up and swung, smashing my steel knuckle fist into the face of the guy with the heavy club. I felt his head snap around the blow, and he crumpled past my legs.

  I must have kicked him a dozen times.

  I grabbed the club with my left hand, awkwardly, for the knucks were still wrapped around my fist. I pulled them off and shoved them in my side pocket, hefting the club. It was a sawed-off chair leg of ironwood with a hunk of lead in the business end. It was heavier than a couple of bricks, and deadlier. It gave me range as well as effectiveness.

  One of the Debs was squawking in a broken wail, and I saw two Flyer bitches working her over. One of them had a long Italian stiletto, and she was slicing up the girl with all the cool aplomb of a butcher.

  I jumped them, not thinking, really, smashing at the hand that held the knife with my billy club. The girl bellowed and screamed something in Spanish. I hit the other one in the stomach, a long flat-out swing in the breasts, and then half the Flyer club was down my shirt.

/>   Those chicks got their kicks. On me.

  I went straight down and they did a rain dance on my head. I didn’t wake up for quite a while.

  When I did, the first thing that shot through my head was Why am I still alive?

  I was a ball of pain, lying under a bush where someone had kicked me and not taken the time to finish me off. There must have been too many things shaking to worry about one downed Baron. I lay there, with the howling and swearing and screeching floating over my head, and the blood running down the side of my face, and my right arm useless. But I was still alive.

  I could see, though I was crying from the pain and there was stickiness in them, mostly blood, and my sockets were burning, but I watched the rumble from the safety of that bush. Gone to ground, all the fight out of me, so call me chicken if you will, but I wouldn’t, couldn’t move.

  They were like wild animals. All over the place. They had been turned loose, with no one to check them, and it was Jeezus, slaughter!

  I tried to get to my knees. I don’t know why, I suppose I wanted to run away. I managed to hunker up onto one knee, and then POW! the Very pistol went off almost in front of me. The Barons were coming back the other way. They’d been routed, or were mopping up, or the damned fight was just getting sloppy, I don’t know.

  But that red glow lived in the sky for a minute and I saw terrified faces turned toward it. It died after a time and the trampling went on unabated. It seemed as though this thing had been going on for hours, but I knew it couldn’t be. The police would have been there before that much time had elapsed. My thoughts were crazy, devoid of rationality. That socking-around I’d gotten had jazzed my brains completely.

  All I could do was stare, like a nut, as they fought back and forth around me. I saw a bunch of girls, tight jeans somehow concealing vicious knives and straight-edge razors, fighting like wildcats. One girl smashed another in the breasts with a lead pipe, and kept beating her with it even after the other had fallen moaning among the leaves.

  No one abroad in the Park that night would have been safe.

  A body tumbled through the bushes and went sprawling, its arms and legs at funny angles, and tried to get up. It was a Flyer. He couldn’t make it. He just lay there, down.

  Fence was shouting something to Samson, yelling, “Hey, Sams’, hey, man, hey Sams’n, help willya!”

  I couldn’t see them, but then the flare gun went off again, except this time it didn’t explode into the sky. I saw a pulsing crimson light in among the bushes and a second later a boy came shrieking through the brush, his arms going in all directions, and his shirt-front blazing. Fence had shot him squarely in the chest with the thermite flare. Oh, God, it was unbelievable. The kid went crashing past me, still burning, and out onto the Avenue, and out of sight behind the cars…except for the glow, which kept illuminating his passage.

  He disappeared down the street and in between two buildings, an erratic journey that may never have ended, or ended only when the flesh was burned away.

  I felt myself clogging in the throat, and a moment later I upchucked what little I had in me. I sat there in it, and everything went gray and swam and boiled and dipped around me. It was like nothing else in this life…totally without reason or pattern.

  Then I heard the siren wail of a police growler. It was coming up the Avenue…no, it was over there on the other side of the Park…no, it was…they were coming from all sides. It had taken them long enough!

  I heard screams, “Leech out! The fuzz! Cut! The nabs are here!” The shouts rose up over the wails of filth and agony of the combatants. Joined in a common bond—hatred of authority, fear of apprehension and the terror of jail—they broke and ran, scattering back the way they had come, leaving their friends and brothers lying on the dew-fresh ground.

  I saw Pooch, a rifle slung across his back, hanging low and scuttling through the bushes toward the Avenue.

  Suddenly I was brought back to a terrifying sense of reality: I remembered my own position. I was as liable to arrest as anyone else lying there. I had to get away myself.

  I dragged myself erect, clinging to the bushes, and took a step. I went right down again, flat on my face. But this time I couldn’t allow myself the luxury of unconsciousness. I struggled to my feet again, and without even feeling my feet moving, ordered them to carry me away. Reflex took over. I limped through the trees, stumbling over rocks and brush and other things, keeping to the edge of the Park till I was a block down. Then I scanned the Avenue, saw nothing dangerous, and sprinted across, falling only once, scraping my hands badly on the asphalt. I gained the safety of a building’s side and looked back. Patrol cars had drawn up to the curb in threes and fours, like great land-creatures, and their headlights as well as spots were flooding the darkness of the Park.

  I could see the cops running into the Park and hear them dragging kids out. As I watched a cop broke out of the trees with a body over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry, and another kid wrapped in his hand, by the collar. He tossed them both unceremoniously into the back seat of the growler, and shouted something to another vehicle down the line.

  I heard an ambulance coming from down the Avenue.

  It was going to be bad.

  I slithered along the face of the building, away from the action, my arm hanging limp, burning terribly, my head filling fast with gray clouds of pain and confusion.

  I ducked into the first alley I came to, between two modern apartment buildings, and followed it to its end, then over a fence and down another alley onto another street.

  I don’t know how long I wandered, but eventually I got back to my fleatrap room, and took a look at myself in the mirror. I had never been beautiful, but I was less so now. Half my face looked like putty, and the other half was devoid of emotion or expression.

  I changed clothes after showering, and rolled up the apparel that had belonged to Cheech Beldone. As far as I was concerned, he had been killed back there in Prospect Park. I cleaned out every little thing in the room that might lead anyone back to me. I packed it all in a paper bag and left the room and the neighborhood. I caught the subway uptown, and changed at Times Square.

  Eventually, years later, ages later, a whole lifetime later, I got off the subway at 116th Street across from Columbia University, and dragged myself to 611 West 114th. I got upstairs and unlocked my room, and threw the paper bag under the bed.

  Then I fell down on the bed and slept.

  When I woke, after hours of terrible dreams and restless tossing, I was not purged, but Cheech Beldone was gone. I was Harlan Ellison again, and I was out of Brooklyn, and off the streets. I did not know what had happened to Pooch, or Filene, or Fish or Fence or any of them. All I knew was that I was safe, and hadn’t been hurt, and would never, never go back.

  TRANSITION

  That was the end of my first journey through hell. I was unable to write about it coherently for several months thereafter. And when I did, it was to find that I had been too completely involved for rationality. I used many of the incidents from my time with the Barons in stories, and once even attempted a complete telling of the ten weeks. It came out very badly.

  Finally, I wrote a novel about it. My first novel. I called it WEB OF THE CITY and eventually it came out, under the title RUMBLE. But it wasn’t a very solid book, though the reviewers were kind to it, and in its own way I suppose it said what I wanted to say, had to say, at that time. But there was still a feeling that I had somehow gone wrong with the concept; it hadn’t been a true re-creation of the kids. Filene was not Filene, Pooch was not Pooch, and Candle came off as some sort of mongoloid, which he had never been.

  Prosaically enough, time passed and things happened. I had brought away from the Barons some implements used by the kids—the set of knucks I’d used in the rumble, the billy club, a .22 revolver, the bayonet, the Italian stiletto without a switch I had used in the stand with Candle—and these were to become visual aids in lectures and panels on juvenile delinquency for PTA gro
ups, YMCA gatherings, high school classes, youth organizations.

  In 1956 I was married and in 1957 was drafted. While serving two years with the Army at Fort Knox, Kentucky, I continued to write, and lecture on juvenile delinquency, using the weapons from Brooklyn. During this latter period I lived in Kentucky and continued writing. It was during this time that RUMBLE was published, and shortly thereafter another book, a collection of short stories about delinquents I had written for various magazines. It was called THE DEADLY STREETS. On April 1st, 1959, I was released from the service and went to Chicago to edit a magazine. I was divorced in 1960, and in the late summer of that year left Chicago, returning to New York. Wandering, really. Trying to find some way to talk about the things I felt, the things I’d seen, and being still unable to set it down properly. I had sold many more stories—some of them about the kids—and several books, but nothing seemed to come out properly about how they were doomed, so helpless there in the streets. And all the while I was getting older, they were growing older, and their kid sisters and brothers taking over the places of the ones I had known.

  What had happened to Filene, whom I had known for so short a time, yet who seemed to be a person truly loved, I had no idea. Or Pooch, who had had a strength, despite his inability to communicate; who was undeniably a man in a world that had made him too old before he was ready. Or Candle, or Fish, or Mustard, or Flo…what had happened to them? I found my thoughts returning to them constantly, trying to imprint new images of them, older faces, new bodies, over my original pictures. I could not do it. I continued seeing them as children, looking at me, asking me to tell it already, to stop cheating them…now that I had duped them and used them, why was I denying them their voices? Why was I hiding what I’d seen, writing it as fiction and thus negating its truth? I had no answers.

  I kept looking in the papers, to see if I recognized any names, but for the single exception of a Daily News squib about a boy named Arthur “Fish” Kohler who had stolen nine cars in two days and been apprehended on his tenth, there was nothing. It might have been the Fish I’d known; I had no way of finding out.