A number of the local street gangs attempted to recruit us, without success. The idea of being a gang member never held much appeal and neither did the idea that we had to kick back portions of earnings to the leader of the pack we joined.
We also weren’t keen on the initiation process most gangs required: rubbing hot pieces of iron on your arm until all the skin came off; scarring you with strange, permanent tattoos; forcing you to pick a fight with the toughest guy from a rival gang, and if you beat him you were in. If you lost, you were a forgotten man. It wasn’t for us. We stayed with who we trusted and we covered each other’s backs. Just like in the western movies we admired.
THE WORST BEATING I ever got in Hell’s Kitchen came not from my father or any other man or boy. It was at the hands of Janet Rivera, street leader of the Tornadoes.
Girl gangs had, throughout Hell’s Kitchen history, been in many ways the most vicious. Unlike their male counteiparts, the girls often attacked without warning or reason. They were also the more aggressive criminals, wantonly stalking passersby for street muggings and casing buildings for doorway robberies. They did not belong to any organized crime faction, but worked as independent operators, hired out for the best price.
In the ’60s, these gangs could already trace their lineage back to the Lady Gophers, who terrorized the Manhattan waterfront at the turn of the century. The Lady Gophers had a special calling card: They left the amputated hands and fingers of their victims behind. A few years later, Sadie the Cat and her crew beat and mugged at will. Gallus Meg was a match for any man she came across, boasting till death of never having lost a fistfight. Hellcat Maggie was said to have once beaten four of the toughest members of the Pug Uglies Gang into submission on a Tenth Avenue street corner, then taken a fifth one home to her boardinghouse bed.
A number of the female gang leaders who lived long enough to survive their street battles opened saloons in their later years. Not surprisingly, many served as bouncers in their own watering holes.
“They demanded respect, those women,” one of King Benny’s back-room men once told me. “They didn’t take any shit, they were always ready for a fight. Knew how to run a business, too, turned a profit on most things they touched. They were tough and mean and everything they did, they made sure they did better than a man. They fought dirty, drank till they were drunk, and slept with whoever they wanted. For a time there, they ran the Kitchen and they ran it well.”
The prevailing image of the mid-twentieth-century Hell’s Kitchen street gang comes from the musical West Side Story. While Leonard Bernstein’s masterpiece contains traces of truth—the racial tensions, a sense of place, the fear of falling in love on forbidden turf, the inability to move beyond social labels—such elements weren’t enough for neighborhood cynics.
West Side Story was the most hated film in Hell’s Kitchen.
“That movie sucked,” Fat Mancho complained. “Guys dancin’ around like jerks, girls hangin’ on to their boys for life, cops dumb as flies. All bullshit. Made the gangs look soft. Made everybody look soft. In real life, soft didn’t last long. They buried soft in Hell’s Kitchen.”
JANET RIVERA STOOD in front of the monument at the entrance to De Witt Clinton Park and popped the lid of a can of Rheingold. She was with three friends, all members of her street gang. One of them, Vickie Gonzalez, had a straight razor in the back pocket of her Levi’s. Janet swigged the beer and watched me walk into the park with John, both of us bouncing spauldeens against the ground.
“Hey!” she yelled. “Get your asses over where I can see them.”
“Now what,” John muttered.
“They’re just breakin’ balls,” I said. “We got no beef with them.”
“We got no time for this,” John said.
“Let’s see what they want,” I said.
“C’mon,” Rivera said. “Don’t be draggin’ ass on me.”
“She is one ugly girl,” John said as we made our way toward the monument. “Her family must take ugly pills.”
“You pricks walk through the park like you own it,” Rivera said, pointing at us with the hand holding the beer. “Where the fuck you think you’re goin’?”
“We’re gonna play some ball,” I said. “I don’t think there’s a problem with that.”
“You’re wrong,” Rivera said. “There is a major fuckin’ problem.”
“Fill us in, gorgeous,” John said.
We knew what the problem was. Two weeks earlier, Michael, rushing to Tommy’s defense, got into a street brawl with a Puerto Rican kid named Rapo from the West 60s. He won the fight and forced Rapo to walk out of Hell’s Kitchen buck naked. Unfortunately, Rapo was Janet Rivera’s cousin, and she was looking to us for a payback.
Vickie Gonzalez put a hand in the pocket that held the razor. The other two girls wrapped sets of brass knuckles around their hands. Janet Rivera tossed her beer can into a clump of grass behind her. None of them looked happy. What would make them happy would be to leave me and John the way Michael had left Rivera’s cousin—beaten, bruised, and naked. Neither one of us was eager to see that happen, and it left us with only one choice, one that any tough, street-savvy Hell’s Kitchen hard case would have made. We decided to run.
“Through the fence!” I yelled to John as we started. “Head for the candy store.”
“They catch us, we’re dead,” John said. “That ugly one wants to kill me. I can tell.”
“They’re all ugly,” I said, looking over my shoulder. “And what’s worse is they’re all fast.”
We ran through a circular hole in a fence on the 11th Avenue side of the fields, across the red clay pitcher’s mound and out the other side, past the Parkies’ way station and the sprinkler pool. We were crisscrossing around the black pool bars when I slipped on a sandhill and landed on my side against a cement edge.
John stopped when he saw me fall.
“Get up, Shakes,” he urged. “They’re right on us.”
“I can’t,” I said.
“You better,” John said.
The pain in my side was intense, jolts sharp and sudden.
“You keep running,” I said. “Go for Butter and Mikey. Get them here.”
“I can’t leave you,” John said.
“You’ll be back in five minutes,” I said a lot more bravely than I felt. “What can they do to me in five minutes?”
I stayed on the ground, clutching my side, watching John run down the hills of De Witt Clinton Park.
It was not the fear of getting a beating that held me. It was the fear of catching that beating from a girl gang. As I lay there, watching Rivera and her crew close in, I imagined the taunts and ridicule that would come, from friends and strangers alike. A lot of boys in Hell’s Kitchen took home cuts and bruises handed out by Rivera and her Tornadoes. Not one of them ever admitted to it, at least publicly, and I was not about to be the first.
Janet Rivera stood over me and smiled, exposing a thin row of cracked teeth. “I knew a little fucker like you couldn’t outrun us.”
“You didn’t outrun me,” I said. “I took a break and waited for you to catch up.”
Rivera walked over toward Gonzalez, putting one hand around her shoulder.
“I hate clowns,” she said. “They’re not funny, you know? They only think they’re funny.”
“What they did to Rapo, that ain’t funny neither,” Gonzalez said, brushing the heel of her sneaker against my leg. “But I bet they laughed.”
“Gimme your belt,” Rivera said. “We’re gonna teach this clown to be serious.”
The park was empty except for an old rummy sleeping under a pile of newspapers on a bench. My face and arms were glazed with sweat and my right leg twitched from tension. One of my shoelaces had come undone and I couldn’t breathe free of pain.
Gonzalez stood over me and opened her straight razor. She leaned down and grabbed the top of my white shirt and cut it in half, stopping just above my pants.
“This is for Rap
o,” Rivera said, swinging the belt above her shoulder.
“Hurt him,” Gonzalez said. “Make him hurt.”
Rivera’s lashes landed across my face and neck, the pain causing my eyes to well with tears. She then lowered the gate of her swing, my chest and stomach now taking the force of the blows. My chest was soon red, the sting as hard as anything I’d felt, a steady torrent of belt against flesh.
Rivera landed one last blow and stopped.
“You wanna piece?” she said to Gonzalez.
“He ain’t man enough for me to whip,” Gonzalez said, looking at me with a smile.
“Thank you,” I mumbled.
The first rock landed next to Rivera’s feet. The second hit her above the thigh. Gonzalez turned her head and caught one on the arm. The two girls who were holding me down let go and moved away.
“We’re goin’,” one of them said. “No more of this.”
I looked past Gonzalez, at the fence behind the sprinklers and saw Michael and John climbing over. Tommy stood facing the fence, tossing rocks over the side.
Gonzalez looked down at me, her eyes filled with hate. She took a deep breath, bent closer to me, and spit her bubble gum above my right eye. She took two steps back and let out two kicks to my groin, the hard rubber of her sneakers finding a mark both times.
“So long, fucker,” she said. “Be seein’ you again.”
When they got to me, Michael and John lifted me up, hands wrapped under my shoulders.
I was slow stepping my way out of the park, toward the bar on 52nd Street. The inside of my chest felt as seared as the outside. But more than anything, I was humiliated.
“I don’t want anybody to know,” I said.
“Might be in the papers tomorrow,” John smirked. “Not every day one of King Benny’s boys gets his ass bopped by some girls.”
“It would’ve been better if they killed me,” I said.
“You’re right,” Tommy said. “Much easier to explain.”
“This only proves what we always knew,” Michael said.
“What?”
“You can’t fight for shit.”
“I hear they make guys have sex with ’em,” John said. “You know, force ’em.”
“Now I’m sorry we came along,” Michael said. “You might have finally gotten laid.”
“I think I’m gonna faint,” I said.
“Ugly sex is better than no sex,” John said.
“Anybody asks, tell ’em a gang from Inwood came down and kicked my ass,” I said.
“Which gang?” Tommy asked.
“The Cougars,” I said. “They’re pretty tough.”
“How about the gang from the School for the Blind?” John said. “You could say they bumped into you on the street. You had no choice. You hadda fight ’em.”
“There was eight of them and only one of you,” Tommy said. “The deck was stacked.”
“And they had dogs too,” John said. “You didn’t have a chance.”
“All I know is the Count of Monte Cristo never got his ass kicked by a girl,” Michael said.
“He was lucky,” I sighed. “He didn’t know Janet Rivera.”
Summer 1966
12
MY FRIENDS AND I were as consumed by sports as we were by books and movies. We followed every pro sport with religious fervor and adolescent passion, except for golf, which was too silly to be considered, and tennis, which we thought was played only in England.
We were rabid New York Rangers fans. Our favorite player was Earl Ingerfield, a hard-skating journeyman who often made it a point to talk to us outside the team doorway. He gave us new hockey sticks every season, which we used in the street games we played on the cement grounds of Printing High School. A crushed can or a roll of black tape was our puck; we wore sneakers in place of skates and our net was a wall.
We loved boxing, finding grace and a certain degree of solace in the savagery of the sport. Middleweight contender Joey Archer was the local hero, winning most of the bouts he fought inside Madison Square Garden. But we found his style dull and plodding compared to the inside power and speed of Dick Tiger, a brave warrior from Nigeria who would eventually wear both the middleweight and light-heavyweight crowns. In later years, Tiger died much before his time, an impoverished man who had seen his country turn into war-ravaged Biafra, and whose new leaders stole his fortune.
We went to the six-day bike races in the fall and listened to Italian and Irish soccer matches on portable radios. We cared little for Knicks basketball and barely tolerated Giants football, though we played both sports with frenzy. We followed horse racing more out of habit than interest. In Hell’s Kitchen, the track was sacred ground and the bulk of the betting was on the nine daily races coming out of whichever local track was in session.
But the sport we loved the most was baseball.
On summer afternoons we flipped baseball cards against other kids, looking to walk away with a bundle of new and valuable additions. We memorized statistics of current and former players and were able to cite the most mundane. We followed the daily exploits of our favorite New York Yankees as if they were members of our own families. We winced if Tom Tresh had a bad day at the plate, Clete Boyer committed a rare error at third base, or Al Downing gave up another long home run. The Yankee teams of those years weren’t really very good, but they were still the Yankees. Our Yankees. They were losers but they acted like winners. Just like us. Which is why we all loved them so much.
WE WERE SITTING on the front stoop of my apartment building, shoeboxes filled with baseball cards by our feet. It was the last week of August 1966 and the New York Yankees were, for the first time in our lives, a last-place team.
“Tough loss,” Tommy said, reading the box scores in the Daily News. “Now even the Indians are beatin’ us.”
“There’s always the Mets,” John said.
“Retards root for the Mets,” Tommy said.
“What’d Mantle do yesterday?” Michael asked.
“Didn’t play,” Tommy told him.
“He’s hurt,” I said. “Again.”
“Who they play tonight?” Michael asked.
“The Orioles,” Tommy said. “Stottlemyre’s pitching.”
“Wanna go?” Michael asked.
“What’s the point,” I sulked.
“We’d get good seats,” Michael said.
“Maybe they’ll go on a tear,” Tommy said. “Win about twenty-five in a row. Get back in the race.”
“Maybe you’ll wake up good-lookin’,” John said.
“Nobody even wants to trade for ’em this year,” I said, holding a handful of Yankee baseball cards.
“I got three Frank Robinsons and two Boog Powells,” John said, looking through a shoebox. “Who you got?”
“Who you want?” Tommy asked.
“Tommy Davis,” John said. “Powell for Davis straight up.”
“I got Davis,” I said.
“Trade?” John asked.
“I don’t know about straight up,” I said. “Davis is good.”
“What?” John said. “Powell’s a cripple?”
“Make the trade,” Michael said.
“Straight up?” I said.
“Seems like a good deal,” Michael said.
“How about you throw in a pitcher?” I asked John. “Any pitcher. I don’t care who.”
“Why?” John asked.
“Gives the deal weight,” I said.
“Forget it,” John said. “Powell for Davis. That’s all.”
“I got a Boog Powell,” Tommy chimed in. “Only it’s from last year.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said.
“You’re gonna trade with him now?” John asked.
“Only if he gives me what I want,” I said. “Powell and a pitcher for Davis.”
“Diego Segui,” John said. “I’ll give you Diego Segui and Boog Powell for Tommy Davis.”
“That’s your best offer?” I asked.
�
�That’s my only offer,” John said.
“Deal,” I said, exchanging cards with John.
“Fucked again,” Michael said to Tommy.
“No, I wasn’t,” Tommy snickered. “I don’t even have a Boog Powell.”
“You lied?” John said.
“I bluffed,” Tommy said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Get the deal movin’, that’s all,” Tommy explained. “Or else you two woulda been yappin’ here all day.”
“You know, Butter, you’re not as dumb as you look,” Michael said.
“No,” John said. “But he is as ugly as he looks. It’s like hangin’ out with that guy with the bells.”
“What guy with the bells?” Tommy asked.
“The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” I interpreted.
John nodded. “That’s him.”
“C’mon,” Michael said. “Ditch the cards and let’s go swimmin’.”
“Where?” I asked. “The sprinklers?”
“No,” Michael said. “The river. We can catch a bunch of eels if we’re lucky.”
“Why is that lucky?” Tommy asked.
“Because Mr. Mangnone’ll give you three bucks for every eel you bring him at the store,” I said. “Dead or alive.”
“What’s he do with ’em?” John asked.
“He eats ’em,” I said.
“You’re pullin’ my prick.”
“I wouldn’t touch your prick,” I said.
“Serious?” John said.
“Boils ’em first. Gets all that shit outta ’em. Then he cooks ’em in vinegar and oil. Lots of spices thrown in. It’s pretty good.”
“You ate eel?” John asked, his face twisted in disgust. “On your own? I mean, without nobody havin’ a gun on you?”
“That’s nothin’,” Michael said. “Tell ’em what you have the day before Easter.”
“Lamb’s head,” I said.
“I don’t believe it,” Tommy said.
“The whole head?” John asked.
“Except for the eyes,” I said. “We give those to my grandmother.”
“Oh, Jesus,” John said. “Why?”
“She mixes ’em with oil and water,” I said. “My mother says it cures headaches.”
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