THE QUEST FOR GIRLS
We will see the transformation, in some boys, of their attitudes towards girls. When Jerry came on the scene the common thing was to take a girl—one you respect, that is—to the movies, then come out and back to the neighborhood, and when you meet the guys on the corner you say, “Ah right, get lost. Go on home.” If she stops to talk to another guy you rap her across the mouth.
The first to openly question this is Paul Martense. Jerry brings his wife, Helen, down to the neighborhood to meet the boys. They are stupefyingly respectful toward her; are set back when she, a most respectable woman if she is Jerry’s wife, addresses them in plain talk, as an equal who rather admires them. When she leaves they are full of questions for Jerry about her, questions that leave out no detail. It is Paul, first, who sees the difference—Jerry really respects his wife. Paul has been trying to go with a girl—the sister of Joe Meister. But—and we shall follow them on a date—he doesn’t know what, quite, he ought to do. Instinctively he wants to be tender with her; but his code requires brutality. It is through Jerry’s example, as well as his open answers to Paul’s tortured questions, that he comes to face the fact that it’s all right to be sweet to a girl, that even if he made love to her sometime he might still want to marry her without being a fool.
With Joe Meister the process is reduced to a comic-pathetic level, for he is so much more mawkish than Paul, less perceptive—he will stop himself from hitting a girl, but then not know what to talk about, and tell her to get the hell home or he will rap her.
If it is possible—and I believe I have a way to do it inoffensively—I would want to show how this gang showed for the first time that it had accepted Jerry Bone. I will not detail the scene here except to say that Jerry is offered a great honor—first chance at a slut the gang is lining up. I understand the shock with which this will be read, but in any case, the moment when Jerry is accepted by the gang will mark a high moment in the first third of the film, be it through this means or another.
So then, another element in the development of this tale will be the quest for girls, and the maturation of their attitudes toward girls—as well as the failure of many of them to make that leap. This theme will move us into parked cars and the arguments therein, the roller-skating rink which is a hunting ground, and will move side-by-side with the more melodramatic elements toward the conclusion. As an instance, we will note how gradually girls do appear among the boys; at the second dance nearly every boy has a girl with him.
We will hang around with the gang on a summer night, hear them singing the latest jazz under the lamppost or in a parked car, go with them as they get bored with this, one to a bar where a holdup is discussed; another to a junky’s apartment, there to obliterate his fears; another to his own house where he studies a book on astronomy in order to confound Jerry and the boys with his knowledge; another to write a letter to a pal in jail.
We will discover the subtle means by which the gang as a group moves to save Rabbit from destruction as an addict—even as they themselves are no paragons in other respects. We will see the gang in conflict with itself. not knowing what to do, when they are confronted with a threat that formerly was always answered with a murderous fight. But now they turn to Jerry for a lead, and he makes them look into themselves for a course of action.
How Joe Meister wanted Jerry to go with him to a church one night to pray for Rabbit, who is dying. And how Joe feared to walk into the church because on his entry “the joint might fall down.”
We will be privy to the dreams they tell Jerry.
And the conflict that runs through the picture between Gook, the professional dope pusher, the very symbol of ultimate disaster, the man who waits for all the boys at the end of the road and will appear like a threatening spirit around corners, in the night, in the dawn, and where he has been we know there is now a broken kid. The threat to Jerry’s life and how he—who could destroy Gook with his fists—eliminated Gook and even lived to hear Gook begging him for help in curing himself.
How Jerry finally had to “waste” Rabbit, and brought himself to make the phone call to the cops, telling them where he could be found. How he forces himself to be present, so that he can take the responsibility before Rabbit; how they chase Rabbit across the roof-tops and when they catch him—nearly drowning in the tank where he is hiding—he slumps into their arms and says, “Thank God.”
And the many reversions: their amazing callousness toward a buddy whose sister has died; their vicious cruelties toward Jerry.
The struggles by some boys to prevent the gang from going with girls; the sometimes hilarious measures these characters will take to prevent the gang from “softening” and “punking out.”
The bewilderment of the parents who unknowingly teach their kids delinquent patterns—the father who buys off a cop and gets his son freed, and the son who comes to wish he had been made to serve his time instead.
The crazy solutions—the overprotective mother who has saved and saved, and desperately, to stop her son from stealing and mugging, buys him a brand-new car—with which he steals more efficiently. And how Jerry made her see what it was she should have been doing with her son all her life. . . .
The threads are all there—I could go on for fifty pages in this vein—but the tapestry remains to be woven. I would add only one element here because it will be thematic.
We read about gangs, we see pictures of them, and the image is one of fierceness. They are certainly fierce in battle—but that is only one part of what they are. A gang fight rarely if ever lasts more than three or four minutes. That fact is a key to many others with which I intend to infuse this film. The truth is that they are scared kids underneath it all, so scared that, as I have said, a gang war can be quickly mediated—if one is adept and knowing. What they must have in exchange for peace, however, is a shred of dignity. These are children who have never known life excepting as a worthless thing; they have been told from birth that they are nothing, that their parents are nothing, that their hopes are nothing. The group in this picture will end, by and large, with a discovery of their innate worth. And Jerry Bone will have been the carrier of that cargo. That is what the picture is about.
The Bored and the Violent
1962
If my own small experience is any guide, the main difficulty in approaching the problem of juvenile delinquency is that there is very little evidence about it and very many opinions as to how to deal with it. By evidence I do not mean the news stories telling of gang fights and teenage murders—there are plenty of those. But it is unknown, for instance, what the actual effects are on the delinquent of prison sentences, psychotherapy, slum-clearance projects, settlement-house programs, tougher or more lenient police attitudes, the general employment situation, and so on. Statistics are few and not generally reliable. The narcotics problem alone is an almost closed mystery.
Not that statistical information in itself can solve anything, but it might at least outline the extent of the disease. I have it, for instance, from an old and deservedly respected official—it is his opinion anyway—that there is really no great increase in delinquent acts but a very great intensification of our awareness of them. He feels we are more nervous now about infractions of the social mores than our ancestors, and he likes to point out that Shakespeare, Boccaccio, and other writers never brought on stage a man of wealth or station without his bravos, who were simply his private police force, necessary to him when he ventured out of his house, especially at night. He would have us read Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, Huckleberry Finn, and other classics, not in a romantic mood but in the way we read about our own abandoned kids and their depredations. The difference lies mainly in the way we look at the same behavior.
The experts have only a little more to go on than we have. Like the surgeon whose hands are bloody a good part of the day, the social worker is likely to come to accept the permanent existence of
the delinquency disease without the shock of the amateur who first encounters it.
A new book on the subject [by Vincent Riccio and Bill Slocum], All the Way Down, reports the experience of a social worker—of sorts—who never got used to the experience, and does not accept its inevitability. It is an easy book to attack on superficial grounds because it has no evident sociological method, it rambles and jumps and shouts and curses. But it has a virtue, a very great and rare one, I think, in that it does convey the endless, leaden, mind-destroying boredom of the delinquent life. Its sex is without romance or sexuality, its violence is without release or gratification—exactly like the streets—movies and plays about delinquency notwithstanding.
Unlike most problems which sociology takes up, delinquency seems to be immune to the usual sociological analyses or cures. For instance, it appears in all technological societies, whether Latin or Anglo-Saxon or Russian or Japanese. It has a very slippery correlation with unemployment and the presence or absence of housing projects. It exists among the rich in Westchester and the poor in Brooklyn and Chicago. It has spread quickly into the rural areas and the small towns. Now, according to Harrison Salisbury, it is the big problem in the Soviet Union. So that any single key to its causation is nowhere visible. If one wants to believe it to be essentially a symptom of unequal opportunity—and certainly this factor operates—one must wonder about the Russian problem, for the Soviet youngster can, in fact, go right up through the whole school system on his ability alone, as many of ours cannot. Yet the gangs are roaming the Russian streets, just as they do in our relatively permissive society.
So no one knows what “causes” delinquency. Having spent some months in the streets with boys of an American gang, I came away with certain impressions, all of which stemmed from a single, overwhelming conviction—that the problem underneath is boredom. And it is not strange, after all, that this should be so. It is the theme of so many of our novels, our plays, and especially our movies in the past twenty years and is the hallmark of society as a whole. The outcry of Britain’s so-called Angry Young Men was against precisely this seemingly universal sense of life’s pointlessness, the absence of any apparent aim to it all. So many American books and articles attest to the same awareness here. The stereotype of the man coming home from work and staring dumbly at a television set is an expression of it, and the “New Wave” of movies in France and Italy propound the same fundamental theme. People no longer seem to know why they are alive; existence is simply a string of near experiences marked off by periods of stupefying spiritual and psychological stasis, and the good life is basically an amused one.
Among the delinquents the same kind of mindlessness prevails, but without the style—or stylishness—which art in our time has attempted to give it. The boredom of the delinquent is remarkable mainly because it is so little compensated for, as it may be among the middle classes and the rich who can fly down to the Caribbean or to Europe, or refurnish the house, or have an affair, or at least go shopping. The delinquent is stuck with his boredom, stuck inside it, stuck to it, until for two or three minutes he “lives”; he goes on a raid around the corner and feels the thrill of risking his skin or his life as he smashes a bottle filled with gasoline on some other kid’s head. In a sense, it is his trip to Miami. It makes his day. It is his shopping tour. It gives him something to talk about for a week. It is life. Standing around with nothing coming up is as close to dying as you can get. Unless one grasps the power of boredom, the threat of it to one’s existence, it is impossible to “place” the delinquent as a member of the human race.
With boredom in the forefront, one may find some perspective in the mélange of views which are repeated endlessly about the delinquent. He is a rebel without a cause, or a victim of poverty, or a victim of undue privilege, or an unloved child, or an overloved child, or a child looking for a father, or a child trying to avenge himself on an uncaring society, or whatnot. But face to face with one of them, one finds these criteria useless, if only because no two delinquents are any more alike than other people are. They do share one mood, however. They are drowning in boredom. School bores them, preaching bores them, even television bores them. The word rebel is inexact for them because it must inevitably imply a purpose, an end.
Other people, of course, have known boredom. To get out of it, they go to the movies, or to a bar, or read a book, or go to sleep, or turn on TV or a girl, or make a resolution, or quit a job. Younger persons who are not delinquents may go to their room and weep, or write a poem, or call up a friend until they get tired talking. But note that each of these escapes can only work if the victim is sure somewhere in his mind, or reasonably hopeful, that by so doing he will overthrow his boredom and with luck may come out on the other side where something hopeful or interesting waits. But the delinquent has no such sense of an imminent improvement. Most of the kids in the Riccio and Slocum book have never known a single good day. How can they be expected to project one and restrain themselves in order to experience such joy once more?
The word rebel is wrong, too, in that it implies some sort of social criticism in the delinquent. But that would confuse him with the bourgeois beatnik. The delinquent has only respect, even reverence, for certain allegedly bourgeois values. He implicitly believes that there are good girls and bad girls, for instance. Sex and marriage are two entirely separate things. He is, in my experience anyway, deeply patriotic. Which is simply to say that he respects those values he never experienced, like money and good girls and the Army and Navy. What he has experienced has left him with absolute contempt, or more accurately, an active indifference. Once he does experience decency—as he does sometimes in a wife—he reacts decently to it. For to this date the only known cure for delinquency is marriage.
The delinquent, far from being the rebel, is the conformist par excellence. He is actually incapable of doing anything alone, and a story may indicate how incapable he is. I went along with Riccio and the gang in his book to a YMCA camp outside New York City for an overnight outing. In the afternoon we started a baseball game, and everything proceeded normally until somebody hit a ball to the outfield. I turned to watch the play and saw ten or twelve kids running for the catch. It turned out that not one of them was willing to play the outfield by himself, insisting that the entire group hang around out there together. The reason was that a boy alone might drop a catch and would not be able to bear the humiliation. So they ran around out there in a drove all afternoon, creating a stampede every time a ball was hit.
They are frightened kids, and that is why they are so dangerous. But again, it will not do to say—it is simply not true—that they are therefore unrelated to the rest of the population’s frame of mind. Like most of us, the delinquent is simply doing as he was taught. This is often said but rarely understood. Only recently a boy was about to be executed for murder in New York state. Only after he had been in jail for more than a year after sentencing did a campaign develop to persuade the governor to commute his sentence to life imprisonment, for only then was it discovered that he had been deserted by his father in Puerto Rico, left behind when his mother went to New York, wandered about homeless throughout his childhood, and so on. The sentencing judge learned his background only a week or two before he was to be officially murdered. And then what shock, what pity! I have to ask why the simple facts of his deprivation were not brought out in court, if not before. I am afraid I know the answer. Like most people, it was probably beyond the judge’s imagination that small children sometimes can be treated much worse than kittens or puppies in our cities.
It is only in theory that the solution seems purely physical—better housing, enlightened institutions for deserted kids, psychotherapy, and the rest. The visible surfaces of the problem are easy to survey—although we have hardly begun even to do that.
More difficult is the subterranean moral question which every kind of delinquency poses. Not long ago a gang was arrested in a middle-class section of B
rooklyn, whose tack was to rob homes and sell the stuff to professional fences. Many of these boys were top students, and all of them were from good, middle-class backgrounds. Their parents were floored by the news of their secret depredations, and their common cry was that they had always given their sons plenty of money, that the boys were secure at home, that there was no conceivable reason for this kind of aberration. The boys were remorseful and evidently as bewildered as their parents.
Greenwich, Connecticut, is said to be the wealthiest community in the United States. A friend of mine who lives there let his sons throw a party for their friends. In the middle of the festivities a gang of boys arrived—their own acquaintances, who attend the same high school. They tore the house apart, destroyed the furniture, pulled parts off the automobile and left them on the lawn, and split the skulls of two of the guests with beer cans.
Now if it is true that the slum delinquent does as he is taught, it must be true that the Greenwich delinquent does the same. But obviously the lines of force from example to imitation are subtler and less easily traced here. It is doubtful that the parents of this marauding gang rip up the furniture in the homes to which they have been invited. So that once again it is necessary to withhold one’s cherished theories. Rich delinquency is delinquency, but it is not the same as slum delinquency. But there is one clear common denominator, I think. They do not know how to live when alone. Most boys in Greenwich do not roam in gangs, but a significant fraction in both places find that counterfeit sense of existence which the gang life provides.
Collected Essays Page 40