ON SOCIETY AND POLITICS
JUVENILE DELINQUENCY
Bridge to a Savage World
1958
Before taking up the film itself I should like to say a few words about conditions surrounding the writing of this memorandum.
For a period of two months I lived with various gangs, in effect, being present during periods of violence, attending secret mediation sessions, questioning every sort of person having any connection with or knowledge of the enormous and complex drama called Juvenile Delinquency. I have before me a mountain of notes and documents, personal stories, anecdotes and so forth. It would be vain to attempt at this stage anything approaching an organized, continuous scenario. The material is still in the process of incubation; I have many questions whose answers no one yet knows.
At this time, therefore, I can only set forth the raw materials of the film, and then only in part. It would be perfectly simple to set a “story” down here, but while it might engage the reader it would be fruitless for me, since I am withholding my inner commitment until I am certain that the story of this film is the story of Juvenile Delinquency and not merely a persuasive fraction thereof.
Nevertheless, it is possible in these few pages to open up a chink in the façade which has thus far shielded the Delinquency problem from intelligent inspection. If I speak of a problem instead of a drama I mean to include both terms in one, for the reality I have seen on the streets is the drama itself. In short, I am endeavoring to keep myself out of this material, to let it form before me as though I were merely an observing and, I hope, understanding eye.
As a consequence of this hands-off attitude I have restrained myself thus far from pressing to completion the several story elements that have already occurred to me. In the following pages the reader will be quickly aware that I am jumping about, so to speak; a character is taken up, spoken of and then dropped, only to appear again a few pages later. A theme is announced and then left to fall by the wayside, but soon retrieved in a later paragraph. All this makes for less than easy reading, but I do not want to knit it all together yet. It is not my way of working. I will be ready to write when the tapestry begins to weave itself into a piece. I am not ready now.
A word, perhaps, is necessary about the New York City Youth Board, a direct arm of the Mayor’s Office. It is now about eleven years old. It began as an experimental project, one of the first of its kind. Its novelty consists of its methods and philosophy which go counter to much previous social-work procedure. The main feature of its method is that instead of sitting in an office, its men go out into the streets, the pool rooms, the dance halls, the homes and hangouts of the very worst gangs, prepared to spend years with them, giving them every kind of leadership and aid in order to relate their members to the values of civilized society. Youth Board workers, one of whom is the hero of this film, have suffered every kind of psychological indignity. But in a few neighborhoods a handful of men has sometimes held back slaughter and in many individual cases raised up seemingly incorrigible young men to decency.
This picture will end in a victory, a victory whose magnitude I can barely suggest in these summary pages. I do not mean to suggest that the Youth Board has solved the problem of delinquency. What it has done, however, is to develop a spirit and a technique which do work. In this picture we shall meet boys who, before they are reached, could fit comfortably into the behavior patterns of the early hordes that roamed the virgin forests. There are elements in the gang codes today which are more primitive than those that governed the earliest clan societies. When a Youth Board worker descends into the streets he is going back into human history a distance of thousands of years. Thus, it is fruitless merely to say that the delinquent must be given love and care—or the birch rod. What is involved here is a profound conflict of man’s most subtle values. The deeper into their lives the Youth Board worker goes, the more apparent it becomes that they are essentially boys who have never made contact with civilized values; boys without a concept of the father, as the father is normally conceived, boys without an inkling of the idea of social obligation, personal duty or even rudimentary honor. To save one of these is obviously a great piece of work and it has been done time after time.
But it has been done in a way that does not conform to the stereotyped notions of social work. What is involved is a deep spiritual transformation which, among other things, makes for the highest drama. The Youth Board worker in this picture is a faithful portrait of actual workers I have met. He is a kind of man not many people realize exists in this world and he is creating boys in his image. The saved boy, in a word, becomes not merely a “good citizen,” or “just like anybody else” after having been an outlaw. Having seen society from the very bottom, the insight he gains is remorselessly honest when he does gain insight. He cannot be “conned”; he is immune to the easy solutions that bemuse the rest of us who are less tightly bound to reality; he is pragmatic and breathtakingly idealistic at the same time. The saved boy in this picture, Paul Martense, will be the second most important character after Jerry Bone, the Youth Board worker.
What follows, then, is a patchwork. I warn again that there will be no attempt to develop characters fully, only to suggest their nature; nor will I try to arrive at any climax. This is purely and simply a glimpse into what is at stake in this film.
Jerry Bone is one pole of the story. He is the Youth Board worker. The other pole consists of the South Bay Rangers, a neighborhood street gang. This sector of the picture is made of Bone’s struggle to save the members of this gang from their inevitable disaster. About Bone now. . . .
To the naked eye Jerry Bone would be hard to connect with social work. His skin is tanned—he spends as much of his scarce free time on the beach at Coney Island where, in an energetic moment, he might be found tumbling and doing acrobatics. He has the fisty walk of an athlete, the sloping shoulders of one who spent a lot of time at the heavy punching bag in his youth. A close look will discern bridgework where his teeth have been knocked out.
But there the resemblance to a pug stops. It is true that he has the extroverted laugh, the body-readiness of the physical man, and when he walks down a South Bay street there is nothing much to contrast him with the tone of that slum. When he stands on a street corner gabbing with the boys, an unknowing observer would take him for one of them grown to manhood (which, in a way, he is, having been in a gang in his youth). Here, one would say, is an off-duty lifeguard, or perhaps—yes, even a slightly affluent small-time racket guy.
Given the appearance of a worker who has acquired some slight middle-class standing, one is then more deeply struck by what comes out of his mouth. He can sling the jive with any of them: “I’m down for that, man.” “You cats are really steamin’, man.” These fall effortlessly from his tongue. But mixed in will be terms like “maturing,” “escape,” “inhibition.”
Bone taught judo in the Army; for a while, most recently, he was a substitute physical-education teacher in a high school. He can fell a man twice his size and has had to do it more than once. But we are not going to create here the hard-fisted man with the heart of gold and the tear in his eye. Bone is too busy trying to see to let tears blur his vision. Too busy trying to understand the vast book knowledge of which he has only a smattering—but for whose wisdom he has a fierce instinctive understanding.
Bone is boyish. He loves boys because he is still boyish himself. He still wears a kind of Ivy League style of clothes, and his hair is cut crew-style. His need for that kind of clothes, very good clothes, expresses the yearning of his boyhood when he was the youngest son in a large family of boys, and never until he was in his late teens had his first crack at a new suit. He is always shaved, his hair is combed, he looks as if he just got out of a shower.
Bone is just the man for the Youth Board project. He will use the most unorthodox methods, never take no for an answer, break through red tape and official apathy with the single-mind
ed verve of the street boy crashing the movie house. None of which, I hope, implies that he is the anti-intellectual sneering at the sheltered, middle-class, social worker. Bone is college-trained, but at night. He respects theory, but reads it with the pragmatic sense of one who is dedicated to saving boys, not proving a theory.
Bone is in a strange position, as are all Youth Board workers, in relation to the Law. He has the right* not to divulge information to the police if, in his judgment, it would save a boy to keep it to himself. He is thus between two dynamic and relentless forces. On the one hand he is trying to be an example of responsible citizenship to the boys, teaching them to obey and respect the law; on the other hand there will be situations in which he must make the terrible decision to keep his mouth shut on the bet—and it is always a bet—that in the long run he will have brought a boy closer to decency by not divulging his crime. For Bone is not a sentimentalist in action. There will be times when, despite his efforts, a boy appears beyond reach. Then he will “waste” him, and when he does we will know the agency of that decision because it always involves predicting the future, and we will know by the time this decision is made in the picture that many a boy who seemed hopeless regained his decency, given the right chance at the right time.
Thus, the police suspect Bone and regard him as at best a nuisance and at worst a sapper of their authority. He is trying to make the boys respect the police, but he must bring them to it in many subtle ways, and during that process there will be times when he must stand up against the police in defense of the boys, even as he, in his mind, is cursing the necessity of alienating, for the moment, the boys from the police.
There will be two sides of Bone’s life in this film. One relates to his work with the Rangers, his street life. The other, equally important, is his home life. He is married, has two children. Put baldly in summary fashion it is difficult to set the tone of his relation with his family, but it will have to suffice here to say that his home-life story follows, roughly, this outline: he begins the picture with his new job, and his wife, Helen, is gratified at the excitement he feels for it as well as the fact that the salary will be steady and higher than he had before. Bone is our bridge, our entryway into this subworld, and he is that for his wife as well. He often brings his boys home so that they may see how a good family lives. But like most of the audience, Helen soon notices that among his boys are dangerous characters. The love she is willing to put out at first, the kind of love Jerry has, is gradually being shriveled by certain acts of ingratitude on the part of certain boys; she, like the audience, will turn against individual boys when they trick Jerry, when they deceive and harm him. In contrast, we shall see the continuing conflict in Jerry as to whether he is being an idiot for having his faith in these characters, and we shall ultimately come to see on the screen a kind of love in him which most men never approach for their fellow human beings.
But Helen has more to struggle against than a recurring suspicion and even distaste for some of these boys whom her husband must accept and spiritually embrace in his work. She knows, at a certain point, that he is in danger, that he has, in fact, been attacked and never told her. And as the years wear on and Jerry goes deeper and deeper into the South Bay jungle, he is home less and less of the time; she is sick of having him awakened at three and four in the morning to run out in any weather to bring back some—to her—worthless kid from the edge of the abyss.
And finally, Jerry’s own kids, having lived a life of waiting for him, having lived, in fact, without his supervision, begin to show the dreadful signs of delinquency themselves. The thematic principle of this story, barely suggested here, is that we have time for everything but our children; but more, that sometimes it is beyond good and evil. Our world with its remorseless disciplinary demands—the machines must be tended, the mail opened, the phone answered—our world is organized without any reference to a family life. And this is one—only one—cause for the bewilderment of our kids. As well, this home-life side of Bone’s life will reinforce a central theme of the picture which is the measure of love which we must bring to our lives if we are not to slide back into a life of violence, such as Juvenile Delinquency presents. Jerry Bone is a carrier of love, and this picture will be a kind of love story—his profound respect and affection for the young human being. But it is our tragic circumstance that we have only so much love for strangers, and because we have not enough, those strangers are striking back at the loveless world we have made.
Jerry Bone will end this story by resigning from the Youth Board. He will have had it. But in a way that will, through its frank facing of the problem, throw light upon what truly must be done in the future. He has spent nearly five years tramping the streets day and night, winter and summer. He is scarred, and he is tired, and he is no longer the thirty-year-old athlete we saw at the beginning. Now he must be a father to his own. But he has changed a neighborhood, as we shall witness, and above all he has made a few confused boys into knowing men. To one of them. Paul Martense, he will pass on the torch. For Paul Martense will have become a new Youth Board worker himself, Paul whom we first saw in this picture leading a gang in street-fighting with an iron bar in his right hand. We will end with Paul Martense walking into a strange neighborhood, as we began with Jerry moving into South Bay looking for the lost boys.
The proud exhaustion of Jerry Bone will emblazon the fact I believe must be placed before the people. This work is hard beyond belief; it wears out people, it makes those who engage in it face every one of their own failings. For to do this work truly, to do it well, it is not enough to “know” or to be “good.” One must be open to knowledge, and above all one must learn how to set fear aside. Here, in rough summary, is the beginning of the picture as I see it now. Perhaps it will help to create a sense of the picture’s tone.
Jerry Bone is walking down a South Bay street. It is night. Bone is obviously on a quest; as unobtrusively as he can he watches any passerby, but makes no advance toward the few people he sees. The neighborhood is one of decaying brick and brownstone four-story tenements, small factories, and a few boarded-up buildings.
He sees a loudly dressed, grey-haired, handsome man standing on a corner, stops and asks, “Any of the boys around?” The man looks him over with humorous suspicion. “What boys?” he asks, uncommunicatively. “Oh,” Jerry begins in a desultory way, “Jouncey Barnes, Joe Meister, Paul Martense. . . .”
“You know those guys?” the handsome man asks.
“No, but I’d like to meet them,” says Bone.
The man just smiles as though he can see through Bone. Bone knows what the man thinks, thanks him and moves on. Two kids playing stickball hit the ball accidentally toward him; he makes the catch, tosses it back, tries to talk to them, but they look at him suspiciously and obviously want him gone. He goes.
He comes on ten boys standing on a street corner. He tries to move in on their conversation. In this group are Joe Meister and Jouncey. The subject is baseball. They tolerate Bone for a moment. Then without ado they break up in two’s and three’s, leaving him with Jouncey and Meister. These two advise him that nobody likes cops around here. Bone says he is not a cop. They imply that if he is not a cop he is pushing dope, and if not, he is a fag from uptown looking for thrills. They can’t get over his clothes, his crew haircut—he’s a square. He starts to tell them he is here to help them, and they turn their backs and walk into a bar, with a kind of warning that he is a stranger here and had better watch his step.
Bone moves on. He comes on another group (all these boys are between fifteen and twenty, with a few “stompers” thrown in—the stompers being under fifteen). This second group is drinking beer in parked cars and on the corner. As he approaches, two boys begin sparring. One is Livertrouble, the other is Rabbit Lewis, both skinny kids. Livertrouble quickly wants to quit because of his liver—a doctor’s chance remark about his liver has been his excuse for quitting school and remaining an illiter
ate. Rabbit is a bright little guy who has never slept anywhere but in hallways or parked cars. Bone watches as the group eggs on the two. He is being noticed, but in the excitement he is not being confronted. Rabbit is now seriously beating Livertrouble, who is hard put. Bone now steps in and coaches Livertrouble, standing behind him and helping to move Livertrouble’s arms to parry Rabbit’s blows.
Suddenly Livertrouble becomes aware of Jerry, this stranger guiding his arms, and disengages himself. Once again the coldness rises in the group. The older boys demand to know why Bone is stopping the fight. Bone says he merely wanted to show Livertrouble a few pointers; he used to teach boxing, he says. To the cops?—they ask. No, says Bone, he’s got nothing to do with the cops; he taught in Beekman High School. Suddenly one boy steps forward and says he recognizes Bone. Bone asks if he went to Beekman High and they all laugh, for few of them have seen a high school inside. Bone is moving closer to them now as he places himself—he also coached a Golden Gloves boxing team from Saint Mark’s Parish, and this is how the boy remembered him. But they keep assuming he is some new kind of cop, a plainclothesman come to do undercover work among them. Worse, he is being openly razzed by Jouncey, Joe Meister—both of whom have now joined this group—and Paul Martense, among others. But Paul is interested in Bone’s way of speaking; when he says a word that Paul does not understand he asks Bone what it means. They are now arguing about the meanings of words, astronomy, engineering—in which one boy is interested in a rudimentary way—and other disconnected subjects. But the cold suspicion is there and we are constantly brought up short by it.
As he seems to be making a slight headway, a squad car stops at the curb, cops get out, line up the whole gang, including Jerry Bone, frisk them all and they are taken to jail. In the precinct house Jerry speaks up for the boys, defending their right to stand peacefully on the street corner. The captain of police believes Jerry is a dope pusher, and finally Jerry takes out a card, explains he is a worker with the New York City Youth Board. The captain, never having heard of the Youth Board, questions Jerry suspiciously. Jerry explains that it is a new, experimental project trying to straighten out the gangs by going down into the streets with the boys.
Collected Essays Page 38