Hard City

by Clark Howard

  “I’m uncorrigible,” Richie said. He did not know if that was exactly the right word, but the juvenile judge had said he was something like that. When he saw a puzzled look on Freddie’s face, he added, “I run away a lot.”

  “Oh,” Freddie nodded in understanding. “I’m down for burglary,” he said with an odd hint of mixed pride and fear. “Me and three guys stole this here safe from the closet of a guy’s house over in one of the fancy neighborhoods. We used a little kid’s wagon to haul it away, stole the wagon too. Then we stole some crowbars from the streetcar barns and pried the thing open in this one guy’s basement. Took us four days to get it far enough open for me to wiggle a hand inside it. But it was worth it, man. We got two thousand bucks! On’y thing is, when the guy come home and seen the safe gone, he had a fuckin’ heart attack and croaked. So my three pals, who was all over sixteen, got sent to Menard and I’m on my way to Charleytown.”

  “Charleytown?” Richie frowned. “What’s that?”

  “That’s where we’re going. This guy I met back at Juvie said that’s what everybody calls it. It’s near this town of St. Charles, see? St. Charles, Charleytown, get it?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Richie said, “I get it. Charleytown.” Looking back out the window, he said, “I wonder what it’ll be like?”

  “We’ll soon find out,” Freddie Walsh said, slumping down in the seat and putting his knees up.

  They rode together for the rest of the trip.

  The two barrackslike structures set off in one corner of the high barbed-wire rimmed fence had signs above their respective entrances that read RECEPTION and DETENTION. When the transfer bus pulled up in front of the former, the boys were guided single-file into an arrival room where they sat on benches and waited as their court records and commitment papers were delivered and a man from administration checked the face of each arrival against the photograph in his folder. Then the escort officer got back on the bus and it left. Richie and Freddie Walsh watched it longingly out a window as it pulled away.

  The man who had accepted their records turned to two older boys wearing dark-blue denim trousers and light-blue denim shirts, and said, “All right, run ’em through.”

  The two boys immediately handed out wire baskets, one to each arrival, from a stack in the corner. “Strip,” one of them said. “Everything off. Come on, let’s go. Everything in the baskets.”

  Richie and Freddie and the others began taking off their clothes. From his trousers pocket, Richie removed his Buck Jones billfold. It was old and tattered now, its zipper broken, the leather peeled off in places; the picture of Buck had long since worn off completely. But it was still a treasure to Richie, something that had been through everything with him.

  “What about stuff like this?” he asked the boy collecting the baskets.

  “Everything in the basket, kid.”

  “We get the stuff back?”

  “Sure, kid. Don’t worry about it.”

  Richie watched the baskets get piled on a small dolly which one of the boys pushed out the back door and was gone. Richie had the sick feeling that he would never see his Buck Jones billfold again.

  The boy who remained guided them naked into a room that contained a single straight chair and nothing else. Next to it was an electric shaver plugged into an extension cord. “Haircut time,” the older kid said, pushing one of them toward the chair.

  One by one they took their turn in the chair. To Richie, the electric clippers sounded like an airplane with a bad engine. It took only seven or eight strokes of the clippers on each boy, and his hair was sheared down to a bluish scalp. Some of the boys laughed nervously at what was happening, but none of them liked it.

  Next they were herded into a shower room where thick bars of brown laundry soap were stacked on a ledge. Turning all the spigots on at once, their guide ordered, “Get under the water, scrub down all over with the soap! Get all the hair off! Come on, let’s go!” The water was hot, and despite the caustic smell of the soap the shower felt good to Richie, reminding him of Midwest Gym. It felt odd to wash his newly bald scalp. Hair-conscious, he noted with relief that most of the boys, like himself, had only light pubic hair; just Freddie and one other boy had a full growth.

  Presently the water was turned off and the boy in charge directed them to a pile of unfolded towels on a table. “Dry off and line up against the wall,” he directed. As soon as they were in place, he moved along the line with a can powered by a rubber pressure ball, dusting their heads, feet, armpits, and pubic areas with great clouds of yellow powder. Some of the boys began to cough and were cautioned, “Don’t breathe the powder! Hold your breath!”

  From the shower room they filed into the clothing-issue room where two boys behind a counter took eyeball measurements and gave them their reform school clothing: dark-blue denim trousers and light-blue denim shirts, just like the boy in charge of them and the others were wearing; white briefs and undershirts; heavy gray socks; black, state-manufactured shoes, unfinished on the insides.

  “Don’t we get no belt?” Freddie Walsh asked.

  “No belts in Charleytown, kid,” he was told with a grin. “See, a belt with a buckle, wrapped around a guy’s fist wit’ four or five inches dangling, can be used as a weapon. We had three guys in one year lose eyes in belt fights. Belts has been banned at Charleytown ever since.” Richie and Freddie exchanged apprehensive looks.

  When they were dressed and carrying their extra clothing under one arm, bedding under the other, the group was led next door to the Detention Building. In an empty barracks of a room on the upper floor, they were told to select cots and a brief lesson was given in how to make one up. “Yez’ll be in this here detention cottage for two weeks,” they were told. “The onliest places yez can go is here and the fenced rec yard outside. All your meals will be eaten in the dining hall downstairs. During the two weeks, yez’ll be called in for examinations by members of the ins’itution staff. If there’s nothing wrong wit’ you, like if you ain’t got the clap and ain’t loony in the head, then yez’ll be sent to a reg’lar cottage.”

  When they were left alone in the big, barren room, some of the boys looked around as if they might cry. It struck a few for the first time—with their stiff new clothes and clipped heads—that they were actually in reform school. Freddie Walsh sat down on his unmade bunk and shook his head sadly . “Guess I won’t be going to a reg’lar cottage with any of you guys,” he announced dejectedly.

  “Why not?” Richie asked anxiously, as everyone looked at Freddie.

  “I’m loony in the head,” Freddie said with a straight face, “and I got the clap.”

  Freddie looked quickly around to see how many fell for it. When he saw that several had, he grinned widely. Richie and a couple of others saw his grin and began to laugh.

  A moment later, they were all doing it. Laughing the tension away.

  Physical examinations were given to four boys at a time. When it was their turn, Richie and Freddie stood naked with a kid named Joey Lupo who had a crooked right eye, and another named Phil Phillips who had a speech impediment due to an enlarged tongue. About Lupo the examining physician said to his nurse, for the medical record, “No treatment. Both eyes have to have amblyopia to qualify for corrective surgery.” About Phillips: “You’ll have to do the best you can; we don’t provide speech therapy here.”

  Richie was found to have scar tissue on both lungs, which was at first suspected to be tuberculosis but turned out not to be. “Multiple healed lung abscesses,” the doctor decided after additional X-rays. “Probably a result of untreated staphylococcal pneumonia.” He asked Richie, “You sick a lot in the winter? Have a lot of colds?” Richie acknowledged that he had. To his nurse the doctor said, “Beats me how some of these mongrel kids survive.”

  Freddie Walsh was found to have healed scars also: strap marks on his buttocks and back. “Old man give you these?” the doctor asked. Turning red with embarrassment, Freddie said yes. The doctor grunted. “Guess he
didn’t give you enough of them or you wouldn’t be in here.”

  After medicals came dental exams. There was one standard for everyone. Trench mouth was treated. Pyorrhea was treated. Ordinary cavities were let alone until they reached the pain threshold, then the tooth was extracted. The Charleytown dentist didn’t do fillings. Richie, who had taken care of his teeth when and however he could, had never been to a dentist before. He had five cavities about which he was told, “When they start hurting real bad, come back and we’ll yank ’em.” Richie silently resolved to brush his teeth as many times a day as he could, thinking that maybe he could brush the cavities away. He swore not to let them pull any of his teeth, no matter how bad they started hurting.

  Psychological evaluations followed. All of them seemed to Richie to be sex-related.

  “Look at this inkblot,” one of the examining psychologists said, “and tell me if it looks like a dirty picture.”

  Shrugging and shaking his head, Richie said, “Looks like a dynamite ‘splosion to me.”

  “Where did you ever see a dynamite explosion?” The psychologist seemed intrigued.

  “Serials,” Richie said. “At least one chapter always ended with a dynamite ‘splosion.”

  “Movies, I see, yes. Tell me, how often do you masturbate in dark movie theaters?”

  “I don’t!” Richie replied, taken aback.

  “Have you ever had sex relations with a man in a dark movie theater?”

  “No!”

  “How about a public restroom?”

  “No!”

  “Public park?”

  “I ain’t never done nothing like that nowhere!” Richie protested indignantly.

  “How about sex relations with a relative, someone in your family, have you ever done that?”

  “No!”

  A sheet of paper and a box of eight crayons were in front of him. “I’d like you to draw me a picture of a naked woman. Use as many different crayons as you wish.”

  Calling upon vivid memories of Frances, Richie used the black crayon to sketch a rough outline of a somewhat voluptuous female figure: narrow waisted, wide of hip, big bosomed. Selecting other colors, he gave his drawing yellow hair on top, and a triangle of brown public hair. He made the eyes blue, the lips and nipples red.

  Before he left the office, Richie heard the psychologist say to a colleague, “Take a look at this. I think this kid must know that little blonde over in administration.”

  Most of the boys were unnerved by the psychological examinations. The psychologists were all unsmiling, unblinking, soft-spoken, somehow subtly intimidating people whose attitude and demeanor seemed to suggest that there was something terribly, terribly wrong with the boys or they would not be there. “It’s like dey t’ink we’re warped or something,” said Joey Lupo, the kid with the crooked eye.

  “Dey dus dank dey bewah dan us,” Phil Phillips said in his afflicted speech.

  Only Freddie Walsh was not bothered by the examination. He had seen a female psychologist, and been asked to draw a male figure. “I drew her one that had a dick that hung down to his knees,” Freddie said, laughing. “You shoulda seen her turn red when she looked at it.”

  Job counseling was the last interview scheduled before they were released into the general population. The counselor Richie got was a thin pale man with a shirt collar too big for his neck. In front of him was a printed form on which he made checkmarks as he asked questions.

  “Ever have any experience doing yard work?” he wanted to know.

  Richie felt like laughing. Yard work? Around Madison and Kedzie in Chicago? “I hardly ever even seen a yard,” he said, making no effort to conceal his contempt for the inquiry. It seemed so stupid; they knew where he was from.

  “Know anything about animals?”

  “Sure. In the slums, cats survive and dogs don’t. And rats can’t resist potato peels.”

  The counselor’s thin lips compressed. “Ever worked as an office boy or messenger?”

  Richie shook his head. “No.”

  “Ever worked as a busboy or kitchen helper?”

  “No. You gotta be sixteen and have a work permit for jobs like that, mister.”

  The lips compressed further. “All these questions are on the form. Just answer them. And,” he tapped his desktop with a pencil, “say ‘sir’ when you speak to me.”

  “Yes sir.” Prick, Richie thought.

  When the counselor finally got to the bottom of the form, he asked the question Richie thought should have been at the top. “What kind of work, if any, have you done?”

  “Pinboy in a bowling alley. Sir.”

  “That’s all you’ve done, set pins?”

  “That’s all. Sir.”

  The counselor smiled a humorless smile. “I guess this isn’t your lucky day. When they built the recreation center here, they forgot to put in a bowling alley. I’m assigning you to the garbage detail. And you won’t need a work permit for it. You’re excused.”

  Real prick, Richie thought as he left. But he realized that his own tough-guy attitude had probably caused it.

  “What’d you get,” Freddie asked when Richie got back to Detention. Richie told him. “I’m on a field crew,” Freddie said. “We hoe weeds and stuff like that ina summer, shovel snow ina winter. What’d you get, Loop?” he asked Joey Lupo.

  “Laundry worker,” Joey replied, cocking his head for better focus.

  “What about you, Philly?”

  “Dabentery keen-op,” said Philly.

  “Dispensary clean-up,” Richie interpreted. For some reason, he was able to understand Philly quicker than the other boys. He did not know if it was because his vocabulary was larger due to his reading habits or not.

  The four of them went outside and sat on the ground in the R-and-D yard, feeling the hard pattern of the cyclone fence as they leaned back.

  “Well, tomorrow’s the big day,” Freddie said. “Tomorrow we go out there wit’ all the rest of the bad boys.”

  “Wonder what it’ll be like?” Richie said, the same question he had asked on the bus.

  “Prob’ly like everything else in life,” Joey said cynically. “A kick in the balls if you ain’t careful.” The smallest of the group, Joey added tentatively, “I hope the four of us gets to stick together. My brother was in here coupla years back an’ he tol’ me you gotta have friends if you wanna get along. Otherwise, there’s guys in here’ll take advantage of you.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Freddie said. Philly nodded eagerly.

  “Yeah, good idea,” Richie agreed at once. Even though he could fight now, Richie was still scared of what tomorrow would bring. This was another new schoolyard for him, and there would always be bigger, tougher, meaner kids to deal with. Having Freddie, Joey, and Philly for friends was as reassuring to him as it was to each of them. “Shake on it,” Richie said, recalling how Buck Jones had once sealed a bargain that way in a movie.

  The four boys self-consciously shook hands all the way around. It made them all feel a little better about the uncertainty of tomorrow.

  41

  Richie, Freddie, and Joey stood on the porch of the Detention Building and watched as a man with an odd, loose-jointed, rolling-hipped walk came over to them.

  “My name is Mr. McKey,” he said. He had sharp, edgelike features, none of which moved when he spoke. “I’m the house father of Polk Cottage, where you three are assigned. You will address and refer to me as ‘Mister’ and you will always say ‘sir’ when speaking to me. Any time you fail to do so will result in your receiving a demerit. Ten demerits will result in punishment. Form a single line and follow me,” he ordered. “No talking.”

  As they walked away, all three boys looked sadly back at Philly, who stood with some other kids, assigned to a different cottage. Richie felt sorry for Philly, but was glad it was the other boy and not him who had been left behind. He hoped Philly would soon find someone else, like himself, who could understand his impaired speech and interpret fo
r him.

  McKey led them along a winding sidewalk across grass-covered grounds, past other cottages and buildings—schools, shops, the administration building, the infirmary—to a long narrow barracks that was called Polk Cottage. In an anteroom just inside the double-doored entrance, the house father directed their attention to a bulletin board. On it was thumbtacked a newspaper clipping with a headline that read: GORDIE MCKEY MAKES ALL-STATE. There was a photo in the clipping of a handsome, smiling boy of about fourteen, wearing a football helmet.

  “My son, Gordon,” said McKey. “He made the varsity team his first year in high school. He’s the only freshman ever named to an all-state football team. I put news about Gordie on this board to show the boys in my cottage what a decent kid does with his life. Might encourage some of you to change your ways.” McKey’s eyes narrowed slightly. “It’s a requirement of this cottage that you read everything I put on the board about Gordie. I sometimes ask questions about it. Anyone who can’t answer correctly is given a demerit.”

  Each boy was assigned a locker. McKey showed them how their spare clothing and towel were to be placed. “Failure to keep your locker neat gets a demerit.” He showed them the shower room. “Wasting soap gets a demerit. Not turning the water all the way off gets a demerit.”

  At one point, when McKey’s back was turned, Freddie Walsh whispered to Richie, “Breathing too much air gets a demerit.”

  McKey’s head snapped around to catch the last movements of Freddie’s lips. “Whispering behind a house father’s back is disrespect and gets a demerit,” he said, taking a small spiral notebook and pencil from the pocket of his khaki shirt. “Walsh, isn’t it? That’s one down and nine to go, Walsh.”

  Watching the house father, Richie had a distinct feeling that McKey enjoyed giving demerits.

  Probably punishment as well.

  Richie, Freddie, and Joey soon learned that life in Charleytown was a never-ending, usually futile effort to avoid demerits. It was practically impossible to do; there were too many pitfalls. An unbuttoned shirt collar got a demerit. Raising your voice got a demerit. Failure to clean your tray in the dining hall got a demerit, as did not being where you were supposed to be when the whistle was blown, looking at the body of a female staff member, walking on the wrong side of a sidewalk, any kind of horseplay, communicating with boys from another cottage except during supervised activities, stepping on the grass, spitting, closing a door too loudly. A shirttail hanging out, slouching posture, even the expression on a boy’s face that the house father did not like, resulted in demerits, as did a multitude of other indiscretions, most of them committed innocently, carelessly, thoughtlessly, or playfully. It was a system, Richie and the other newcomers soon learned, that made for a lot of tension. Most of the kids sent to the training school were already old beyond their years. At Charleytown they got much older.