The captain regards Jerry as a social worker now, the worst nuisance some cops can think of. Through their argument we learn that this is the worst neighborhood in the city, three boys have been killed in the past two months; nobody is safe on the streets because of these hoodlums. Jerry continues to defend the boys, attempting to placate the captain at the same time. The captain, to prove their viciousness, points out the major characters among the boys—(and of the film)—calling off the frightful record of each one in turn.
Thus we are introduced to the five leaders of the South Bay Rangers—among others: Jouncey, Joe Meister, Paul Martense, Houseroof McCall, Blitz Capolino. Their offenses go from burglary to mugging, to statutory rape to gang fighting, car theft, vandalism and assorted mayhem. As we spot each boy we see before us what anyone would call a grizzly crew of hoodlums, their hair long in the zoot style, their lips set in a sneer—the usual image of the captured gang-busting kid.
The captain now picks out three boys who are on parole and intends to lock them up because they are not supposed to be out on the streets at night. Jerry argues him out of it, promising to convince them to stay home from now on. The captain lets them all go with the warning that he is going to crack heads the next time they are found gathered together anywhere at night.
Out on the street the boys are overjoyed at Jerry’s ability to “psyche up” the cops. Throughout the scene in the precinct house they were bewildered, then astonished, and finally wondrous—this is the first human being who had shown the slightest concern for them without lecturing them or demanding anything in return.
As they walk, the questioning begins. Who pays Jerry Bone? What is he doing here? Why does he bother? How much does he make? Will he be coming back again? The answers to each question amazes them even more. He will be here for years; he makes thirty-three hundred a year; he will come in the day and in the night; the city pays him; and most importantly—and it is said under a lamppost in the hush of a slum night in spring—Jerry likes boys. He himself was brought up in such a slum. He wants to see them get a break; he will try to help in getting jobs. . . .
Immediately he is swamped with requests. One boy wants him to tell his parole officer that he is sick so that tomorrow he won’t have to report in. Jerry, however, refuses; explains he will never lie for them. Suspicion descends again. Another boy wants a job at sixty-five a week. Jerry says he might arrange one for thirty-two.
Once it is clear he is not Santa Claus, Jouncey and Joe Meister insist the whole scene in the precinct was staged—that Bone is here to find who murdered the victims of their last gang fight with the Golden Moguls. Jouncey looks as though he is going to challenge Jerry right there. Jerry says he never fights unless nothing else is possible. Jouncey takes this for weakness and baits him. There is a deep difference of opinion among the gang, an uneasiness. But Paul Martense is taken with Jerry. He tries to draw Jouncey off. . . .
Suddenly a boy comes running into the group. (I ought to add that one of the big subjects Jerry throws at the boys after leaving the precinct house is gang-fighting. He is here essentially to stop further wars but is getting nowhere.) The new arrival announces that the Moguls have just invaded Ranger turf. Instantly the boys take off. Jerry is bewildered. A moment ago they were lounging around the lamppost, full of curiosity, some hostility, but a lot of humor and amusement—now they are all business. He follows them and finds they have disappeared around a corner. Suddenly Jouncey, Joe Meister, and Paul Martense come scaling over a six-foot board fence which shields an empty lot—the arsenal; they land on the sidewalk with iron bars in their hands, behind them scrambling over the fence come ten, twenty, forty—about seventy-five boys, all armed with the ugliest weapons. They sweep past Jerry who can’t find one of them to answer him. He follows them on the run, trying to get anybody to tell him where they are going and why. They now begin splitting up—and to be brief, confront the enemy gang; the war flares, vicious fighting ensues, Jerry can’t bear the sight of it and turns away, as he shields himself in a doorway, and in three minutes it is over. But not before both sides promise further revenge, and a half-dozen boys are left unconscious and bleeding.
WHY DID THEY FIGHT?
Now, when he tries to help, Jouncey and Joe Meister and Paul Martense and others flare up at him. For he wants to know why they fought, what good it did— Their honor was at stake, their dignity, their neighborhood. For a moment Jerry sees that for them this fighting represents a kind of knighthood, an opportunity for bravery, for conquest, for courage, against an enemy that can be seen and felt and hurt. They want compliments on their bravery now, not questions. He helps them carry away their wounded.
The process of the story—aside from Bone’s relation to his wife and family—is a process of identification of the boys with Bone. When Bone refuses to lie for them; quietly, stubbornly helps them only so long as they will face their obligations to authority; when he will not trade punches with them short of the last extremity of self-protection—and then fells them quickly; when, in short, they try and fail to degrade him and he survives with his values intact and is still not a “square” or a YMCA guy, they begin not only to respect him but to identify themselves with him as one does with one’s father. But this has its costs too, for while there are some who are raised up to a new standard of personal values through such identification, there are others who spiritually faint, so to speak, before the terrific climb they will have to make in order to be “like Jerry.” Some of these become even worse than they were before, and Bone himself will become aware as he sets forth these values (but, of course, always through behavior, example, and sometimes at terrible risk to himself) he will become aware that what he is teaching them he must first teach himself. Thus, we shall witness the maturation of Jerry Bone even as he is helping these dangerous boys to grow up. The picture will span a period of four years.
Bone, as I have said, will be our bridge, our entryway into this subworld that has come to terrify us in this age. I intend to work this story so that its two poles interact upon each other toward a climax that will illuminate not only how a boy—or boys—is saved, but how, in his effort to save them, Bone himself has had to face and transform his own private life.
Of the boys, five of whom will be major in size, one, Paul Martense—along with his girl—will be the leading character second to Bone. Of the others, their fates will each be unique, even while their beginnings were the same—that is, we shall meet them all as hoodlums, with the defiant zoot haircuts (which slowly become Jerry’s crew-cut as they come to identify themselves with him), the zoot pegged pants, and the cold, brutal sneer. The body of the picture will be a kind of mining operation—we will move deeper and deeper into their souls with Jerry Bone.
Outwardly, the suspense, the progression of the story will be generated by two impending possibilities. Having drawn them away from gang-fighting and marauding, Bone can never know when, without a moment’s notice to him, they will resume it—and it will threaten many times and in the most brutal forms. The overhanging question will be, quite simply, whether and how each of these boys, with whom we shall have sympathy, will “make it.”
SALVATION IS A MATTER OF MATERIAL THINGS
The bare fact will be borne in upon us that in many, many cases salvation is a matter of material things. Jouncey, for instance, who is one of the most violent of the boys, who kicks Jerry’s teeth in one night when Jerry seems to be playing basketball so expertly as to menace Jouncey’s leadership—Jouncey who has already cut his hair short in tacit admission that he is trying to be like Jerry—Jouncey later that night is brought down to a weeping hulk not by Jerry calling him an ungrateful mutt, but by his own confusions. For, in fact, Jerry has come back, after their fight, to apologize to him for his own stupidity; he never should have shown up Jouncey on the basketball court and he asks now to be pardoned. But he presses Jouncey to face certain facts of his (Jouncey’s) behavior, mainly, that time and agai
n Jouncey, who loves Jerry in an unadmitted way, is suddenly and crazily moved to kill him—as he was moved to try to kill an inoffensive man the other night who asked him a street number.
I will not attempt to detail this scene here, except to say that Jouncey is an illegitimate boy whose mother feels her guilt whenever she lays eyes on him, and yet wants to help him; a boy looking endlessly for his father; a brawny boy who wants Jerry’s love, yet cannot accept it; a boy who is moving toward dope addiction as a way out, and yet is strong enough to break the habit when he wants to.
I realize as I give these bare facts that he is repugnant; he is. But he will be a striving, groping, oftentimes sweet and gallant and winning boy. He will know his greatest triumph when Jerry arranges for him to call up the Army General in charge of recruiting—and he convinces the General to forget his police record and let him join the Army. But he will return AWOL, lost, ready for vengeance against himself, and he will commit his great crime in order to bring himself over the edge of his abyss.
But before he does, Jouncey will come to Jerry and ask—finally plead—to be taken to somebody who will help him out of his confusion. (I repeat, on the surface this will be a hoodlum, somebody to frighten any man on any street.) Jerry will try to get a psychiatrist to take him on free of charge—and there will be none in the whole city, for the facilities are jammed.
In another instance, Rabbit will finally be brought by Jerry to the point where he is ready to face the consequences of his actions, a victory for him and for Jerry. But the prisons have no facilities for curing junkies; Jerry tries everywhere but every place is full. He finally gets Rabbit into Kings County on a ruse and he is put out in a few days. He wants help, he is ready to be helped and there is no place he can get it. He surrenders himself to the police in the hope that more isolation in itself, combined with his now fierce will to survive, will cure him. But, ironically, they do not put him in jail. They parole him to his one surviving relative—an aunt in a country town—the condition being that he never come back to his neighborhood. He tries, he works, but he’s lonely for the companionship of the streets. Rabbit is a boy who never had a family, was put on the streets at seven when his parents died. In this rural family he finds not companionship but commands, discipline, and the attitude that he might do wicked things at any time. In South Bay he is accepted, left alone. . . . Rabbit ends a junky, the ultimate image of the boy whom nobody gave a damn for; a boy to whom Jerry came too late.
But there will be Joe Meister, a shy bruiser of no intellect who learns where his true dignity lies; who finds in Jerry the good father he never had—although his father is alive and always tried to help him, but never had any dignity himself. His father, a longshoreman with seven kids, works hard, spends his evenings in the congenial bar, addresses everybody as “Cuz,” challenges all newcomers to a footrace around the block—but hasn’t a clue to the fact that in all this he has reduced himself in Joe’s eyes to a clown, and Joe is ashamed of him even as he shields him from strangers who might laugh at him. Joe Meister will end, as I have said, a steady working man who still gets drunk on Saturday night but is paying his way and is learning that you don’t have to slap a girl across the face in order to show you’re a man. And he learned it from Jerry one night when in a hallway they sat on a step, and Joe asked Jerry if he ever hit his wife, and why not, and why would she obey if he didn’t hit her, and a world is opened up to him of people who are faithful to one another because they love one another.
There will be a moment when, without Jerry ever suggesting it. Joe Meister and Paul and Jouncey himself will turn this gang toward the dope pushers and run them out. This will be one of the new “dignities” to which they attach their old, destructive esprit de corps.
They will have stopped gang warfare in stages. Most of these stages are outwardly more hilarious than grave. Briefly, Jerry finally convinces them that it is absolutely stupid for a hundred or two hundred guys to risk arrest, jail, or being hurt or killed, just because two members of rival gangs gave each other a dirty look, interfered with each other’s girls, and so forth. He arranges the first “fair fight.” A member from each gang is chosen, they get into Jerry’s car, and he drives them around the water front looking for a battle ground. He lengthens out the ride, subtly trying to get them to know one another. Each of them is growing more and more scared of the other one, now that they are alone together, and both are getting angry, therefore, at Jerry for not letting them go at it. He finally has to let them out. They circle each other endlessly, for the will to fight is not quite there any more; they finally join, fight for five minutes, the agreed-on time, get back in the car and Jerry drops them on their respective corners where their gangs await the results.
We will shoot each of the gladiators reporting how he very nearly killed the other. We will hear a report, in effect, of some Louis-Schmeling fight—and we will see how both sides “won”—and how Jerry tells each boy what a great contribution he made to the good name of the neighborhood (the neighborhood being like a nation), and he will enlist these gladiators in keeping the peace. I ought to add that if the cops caught them fighting they’d have pulled them in, and Jerry with them, thus the secrecy of the ride.
We will see the varied development of the cops. I wish to mirror reality, and it is real to say that some cops love to bat these boys around, and some learn from Jerry, and more importantly from the gradual change in the neighborhood, that something new has entered their lives. They begin imitating Jerry’s methods—sometimes with idiotic results. But it will come to pass where they know that Jerry knows more about crime here than they can hope to, because he has the confidence of the boys. They will come to respect that confidence. There will also be cops who mistrust him to the end, for the wedding to force is not quickly broken.
There will be Jerry’s attempt to transform the gang into a social club devoted to constructive ends like holding dances. We will see that these boys do not know how to dance, that they have not been able to get girls because the girls have been afraid of them. We will see their first lesson in democratic debating procedure and the riot that results the first time Jerry tries it with them. Their first dance when suddenly members of the Moguls entered—and Jerry managed to get them to let the Moguls dance with their girls, for a minute or so. And how they nearly fainted when Paul Martense suggested they ask the precinct to send a cop over to police the dance. They only agree when Paul says this will make the cops work for them.
We will see how Livertrouble conceived the idea, on a very hot night, of making a swimming pool out of the water tank on the roof of the housing project, and the lesson in physics that resulted.
And one of the greatest days of their lives (and mine) when they finally agreed to go on a camping trip. Throughout the picture their boredom will be like an insistent counterpoint to every moment, every act. They simply have nothing to do. The great city is building and rebuilding, the traffic is endlessly flowing, the phones by the millions are ringing, the lights are blinking on a thousand marquees, but they are afraid to leave their corner, especially alone, and they live without an inkling that people are supposed to occupy themselves, that their lives are supposed to be meaningful. Thus, the idea of a camping trip is outlandish at first. What’s to be gained? Girls? Free whiskey? What? No, Jerry says, you just have fun together. The simple fact is these boys never learned how to play.
Doubtfully they prepare. The first thing is to steal camping supplies. Jerry makes them return them because he won’t go with stolen goods. (This motif flows through everything; he does not lecture them, but simply will not commit an immoral act. Thus, as they grow to identify themselves with him, they cease to suggest immoral acts to him, ultimately police one another. The time comes when individuals in the gang call down others for “disappointing Jerry.” They are tougher with their defaults than Jerry is.)
I will not detail the camping trip lest I lengthen out this report beyond measur
e. We will see the slum confronting nature. Liver-trouble catching a fish, the first live one he ever saw, tying a string around it and walking along the shore with “my fish,” which he is heartbroken to leave when they have to return home. (“I’m commutin’ with nature,” he said to me.) We will see the “Y” director at first refusing Jerry the use of the camp; the “Y” to be sure does want underprivileged kids, but the Rangers are too tough for them. He accedes on Jerry’s promise that they won’t destroy the camp.
The terror of the camp’s overseer when he first sees the boys arriving in two jalopies and Jerry’s car; his joyous farewell after they have left the place cleaner than it ever was before (because they wouldn’t let Jerry down). But the chaos of trying to organize meals, the hilarious competition—suddenly four guys have got to be cook. The baseball game, when Jerry discovers that nobody wants to play the outfield. Why? Because if a guy is way out there all alone and misses the ball the indignity will be too much for him. They end by playing the outfield in droves—ten guys running for the ball so that no individual will have to take umbrage if he misses an easy fly.
Their sudden, and unprepared, confrontation with some middle-class kids. The Rangers are tough, they have seen or committed almost every crime—but these sissies, as they appear, can really play baseball, swim better, run further, because they have learned to cooperate, because they’ve had a chance to play, because they didn’t start smoking and drinking at the age of nine. The Rangers watch the sissies play, but in a somber, introspective mood. Some of the most beautiful insights into their lives will come in this sequence. We will see two worlds meet here.
Collected Essays Page 39