Hard City

by Clark Howard

  “We sure as hell are,” Bobby agreed. “This is a hard fucking city; lots of people ain’t making it at all.”

  Richie stared at Bobby for a moment. The boy’s words triggered a memory; from somewhere in Richie’s mind a thought surfaced: It’s a hard city, and it can break you.

  Shaking his head, Richie tried not to pay any attention to it.

  Richie, Stan, and their friends lived on the underbelly of life. Most days they slept until noon, after staying up until three or four in the morning. Their daylight hours started with midday breakfast at some coffee shop in the area of Solly’s Pool Hall, and from there they went at once to the rear pool table, which was seldom in use. For half the afternoon they shot pool, drank beer, smoked cigarettes, and kept Solly’s jukebox fed with a continuous supply of quarters. The music was cut off only when some of the Italian or Jewish mobsters came in to shoot some high-stakes games on one of the front tables, at which time Solly walked back and unplugged the Wurlitzer and no one said anything to him about it, even if it was in the middle of Peggy Lee singing “Mañana,” which was their favorite and which, on an average day, Richie and Stan played twenty times or more. When the mobsters shot pool, the boys all sat around and watched them in awe: the Italians in their pork-pie hats and silk sport shirts buttoned at the neck; the Jews in their flowered neckties with diamond tie tacks, and perfectly creased snap-brims. They were quiet men who spoke with their eyes or with gestures, or by not speaking at all. Sometimes when a game ended, fifties and hundreds changed hands.

  When the smoke and beer of Solly’s became oppressive, they left and sought other amusement. Sometimes they rode a streetcar downtown to one of the big first-run houses to see a new movie just out; sometimes they bowled a few lines—in the very bowling alley where Richie had once worked and slept; sometimes they used Jo-Jo’s back room to play cards or shoot dice; sometimes they simply stretched out on the grass in Garfield Park and talked about things that intrigued them.

  “You seen a picture of that new swimsuit they call the ‘bikini’? Jesus Christ, a broad is practically naked in that thing!”

  “I heard on the radio that this guy Eben whatever-his-name is, that wrote “Nature Boy”, lives in a vacant lot and don’t eat nothing but nuts and berries.”

  “They’re finally giving Jake LaMotta a shot at the middleweight title. He’s gonna fight that French guy Cerdan. That jack-off will be lucky he don’t get killed by LaMotta.”

  “What is it with these fucking German cars they’re bringing over here, this Volkswagen thing? We just barely got through kicking those cocksuckers in the ass during the war, now we’re gonna let ’em sell us cars?”

  “Wonder what they’re gonna do about that spade Jackie Robinson playing ball for the Dodgers? Those fucking people in Brooklyn must have shit for brains.”

  And so it went until at last the summer sun began to go down and the boys returned to their rooms and took showers and, some of them, shaved, and carefully recombed their ducktails until they were perfect: shiny, glossy, every hair in place. They changed into pressed pegged trousers, their fanciest shirts, snappiest Cugats, highly polished Bulldogs, and went back out to loiter again, first around the drugstore where they ate supper, then around Jo-Jo’s to wait for the girls.

  Richie’s and Stan’s favorites were Marcella and Toni, and they traded them back and forth like chattel, deciding between themselves, without consulting the girls, who would go with whom for the evening. Marcella and Toni did not seem to mind; Richie and Stan were the best looking of the gang, and the girls were happy to be with either. Bobby Casey got whoever he could, which a lot of the time was no one because of his acne. The couples had sex when and where they wanted to: on the cardboard behind the hedge in the park, in the back seat of some car they hot-wired and took joyriding; in Stan’s apartment when his mother went away for the weekend; sometimes just standing up in the hallway of one of the buildings where the girls lived. When they did it standing up, Richie and Stan were able to get away with not using a rubber, because Stan had convinced both Marcella and Toni that a girl could not get pregnant if she did it standing up.

  A lot of the time when Richie was with one of the gang girls, he would find himself thinking about Linda. As earnestly as he tried not to, the thoughts simply came to mind, and he became aware that they were there, that he was thinking about her, much as thoughts of his father had surfaced when he was younger. Particularly in movie theaters, when he was in a back row petting heavily with Toni or one of the others, he would find himself thinking that he had his hand inside Linda’s blouse, up Linda’s skirt, feeling Linda’s breast or thigh. It bothered him, frequently making him moody or quiet, causing the girl he was with to need reassurance several times that she had done nothing wrong. Occasionally, before his disposition returned to normal, the vexation erupted into anger. Once, in the Paradise Theater, when Richie, Stan, and Bobby Casey had girls in the back row, an usher shone his flashlight on Richie and told him if he wanted to undress the girl, to take her to a hotel. Richie was out of his seat and after him in an instant as the usher walked back into the lobby. Grabbing him by the shoulder, Richie jerked the bigger, older usher around.

  “You trying to be a fucking wiseguy?” he challenged.

  “Don’t start any trouble,” the usher warned, pointing his flashlight at Richie.

  “You’re the one starting trouble, jack-off!” Richie told him loudly. “We weren’t bothering anybody in there!” Stan and Bobby edged out the door to back him up as another usher and the manager started toward them. The girls, as they had been told to do, came out a different door and were already walking toward the street exit.

  “You bought a ticket to watch a movie in here, not get laid,” the usher said.

  Richie knocked the flashlight out of his hand, feinted a left, and drove his right fist into the usher’s face. The usher stumbled back and Richie stepped in quickly with a left and a right to the stomach. As the usher doubled over, Richie winged a right cross to the side of his face, then converted his next punch to an uppercut that straightened him back up. Seeing a splotch of blood in the middle of his face, Richie used it as a target and drilled two right crosses directly to it. The usher dropped to a heap on the floor, his gold Balaban-and-Katz coat splattered with his own blood.

  “I’m calling the police about this!” the tuxedoed manager threatened.

  “You do, you motherfucker,” Richie snapped, “when you come to work tomorrow you’ll find a pile of ashes where this fucking theater used to be!”

  Still seething at the arrogant audacity of the usher, he stalked away, Stan and Bobby backing up after him.

  They never went back to the Paradise that summer.

  And Bobby Casey, after what he had witnessed, became considerably softer in his attitude toward Richie.

  One thing that Richie did not do that summer was resume looking for his father. It was not a conscious omission, more like a headache that one suddenly realizes has passed. With everything else that was going on in his life, the longtime, frustrating search simply had not surfaced. Richie might not have even thought about it if Stan had not mentioned it one day.

  “You ever find out what happened to your old man?” Stan asked.

  “No, never did,” Richie replied. They were sitting on the Garfield Park lagoon pier, idly tossing pea-sized pebbles into the water and watching the ripples.

  “Man, that sure used to piss you, not knowing where he was. Remember?”

  “Yeah.” Richie grunted softly. “Twelve years old, looking for one guy in a city the size of Chicago. Real bright.”

  “I used to wonder which one of us was the worse off,” Stan confided. “You, not knowing where your old man was, or me, knowing he was just a few hundred miles away but only getting in touch with me on my birthday and Christmas.”

  Richie looked at his friend, surprised. He had never known Stan was bothered by that. “Did you ever decide?” he asked. “Which one of us was worse off?” />
  “Neither,” Stan declared. “We were both better off. If a kid’s old man don’t care enough about him to stick with him, then he’s no fucking good as far as the kid’s concerned anyway. He may be a great guy as far as other people are concerned, but he’ll never be nothing but a drag to the kid. You’re smart not to be looking for your old man any more. Whatever happened to him happened years ago, it don’t have nothing to do with today. Who the fuck cares about yesterday, man; it’s over, right?”

  “Yeah, right.”

  At that moment, Richie believed it. Stan was right. Richie realized that he no longer needed to know what had happened to his father, any more than he any longer needed his father. What was past, was past. What had happened, happened. Fuck it.

  The one person from the past that Richie did go look for that summer was, on an impulse one night, Vernie. He told Stan he was going to see an old friend of his mother whom he had promised to visit when he got out of Charleytown. There was nothing planned for that night anyway; they were laying low after burglarizing five movie houses in four nights.

  When Richie got to Lake Street, he made his way along the once-feared avenue with one hand in his Cugat jacket pocket, thumb on the release button of his switchblade. Because it was summer, there was evening activity on the street: people sitting in doorways talking, smoking, drinking beer, the men in their undershirts, women in loose cotton dresses obviously with nothing on underneath; other men in zoot suits, loitering in twos and threes, passing around a pint bottle with a brown bag wrapped around it; an occasional younger woman with one breast out, nursing a baby; smaller kids running and playing under the el tracks; older teenagers jiving and shucking, trying to be bad. The eyes of all of them followed Richie as he ambled along, purposely with a swagger, never keeping his own eyes on anyone’s face long enough for it to be considered a challenge, his outward attitude one of disinterest and confidence, the one hand in the pocket clearly a caution.

  He found Vernie near the corner of Washtenaw, standing in a group of other girls, just as she had been the last time he saw her. The girls looked him up and down as he approached, curious because white johns came to Lake Street only in cars, never on foot. Vernie glanced at him, also apparently without recognizing him, so Richie had to walk all the way up to them.

  “Hey, Vernie,” he said, and then her eyes got wide and her full, pink-colored lips parted in surprise.

  “Goddamn!” she exclaimed. “Hey, baby, you looking good!”

  “Yeah, you too,” Richie said with a grin as Vernie gave him a full body hug and kissed him on the cheek.

  “What you doing down here?” she asked. “You carrying for yo’ mamma again?”

  “No,” Richie replied, blushing. “I just came down to see you.”

  Taking his arm, Vernie drew him away, saying, “Le’s go over where we can have some privacy. You don’t want to be seen wif’ girls like these; you wouldn’t believe the things they do for money!”

  Amid a chorus of jeering and scoffing, Vernie led Richie to a yellow Cadillac parked at the curb and eased her tightly bound buttocks down on the front fender. “Oooh-eee, you sure do look sharp, Richie,” she praised. “And you so tall!” Her large brown eyes became knowing as she said, “You can take that hand out your pocket, honey; you with Vernie again. Now—I want you to tell me all about where you been and what you been doing wif’ yo’self.”

  Richie reviewed the last few years for her, beginning with his mother’s death, which seemed to make Vernie sad, to his time in Charleytown, which made her mad, to the school year he had just spent in Lamont, which impressed her. “Richie, that is so fine! You always been good in school,” she said, winking. “I knows ’cause I be the one that signed mos’ of your report cards, ‘member?”

  “I sure do remember,” he said. “I remember everything you did for me. That’s another reason I came to see you. I wanted to give you this—” He slipped her a folded hundred-dollar bill, one of several he now had saved in a money clip in his buttoned shirt pocket.

  “Where you get this kind of money, boy?” she asked critically.

  “I saved it. I been working all summer.”

  “Doing what?”

  “I’m an usher at the Paradise Theater.”

  “And you want to give me this? A hundred dollars?”

  “Yeah.” He glanced down. “For always being so nice to me.”

  Vernie looked as if she might cry. “You are the sweetest white boy,” she said, putting a palm on his cheek. Suddenly her eyes danced with mischief. Sliding off the fender, she hooked her arm in his and said, “Come on. I got a little surprise for you.”

  As they walked past the other girls, there were several gibes made, cracks about Vernie robbing some po’ white mamma’s cradle, and giving up the street to become a wet nurse.

  “You bitches jus’ jealous,” Vernie retorted. “This here happens to be my fiancé. We gon’ get married and I be living out in the white suburbs while you ‘hoes still down here in the ghetto. ‘Bye, y’all.”

  Vernie took Richie half a block down the street and up a flight of dark stairs to a hallway dimly lighted with yellow bulbs. Knocking on an unmarked door, she called softly, “Ella Mae? You busy?”

  “Come in,” a quiet voice answered. To Richie, Vernie said, “Wait here a minute.”

  Vernie opened the door just wide enough to slip inside. As Richie waited in eerie lighting, he put his hand back on the switchblade. A door down the hall opened and a black woman with a hairnet on her head looked out at him for a moment, then went back inside. Suddenly feeling like he had to go to the bathroom, Richie began shifting from foot to foot. He was getting ready to knock on the door when Vernie came out.

  “I gots to get back downstairs now,” she said. Lifting her face, she kissed Richie full on the lips. “This is a little present for you,” she told him, opening the door and pushing him inside.

  The door closed behind him and Richie stood in a sparse little bedroom lighted by a single small lamp in one corner. Sitting on the side of the bed, nude, was a brown girl of perhaps fourteen, placidly painting her fingernails. She had a compact young body with tight, coned breasts and rigid, very light nipples.

  “Hi, Richie,” she said, smiling up at him. “Go ahead and get undressed. I’ll be finished in a minute.”

  An erection starting, Richie locked the door and began taking off his clothes.

  It was shortly after his visit to see Vernie that Richie’s depression set in. It had nothing to do with his experience with Ella Mae; that had been a memorable encounter leaving him pleasantly drained for two days. Rather it was, several days later, an annoying thought, which would not go away, of Vernie selling herself night after night on the street corner like she did. It was nothing new to him; he had known for a long time what she was doing. But for some reason it had never bothered him before. Incongruously, he kept remembering her beautiful cursive handwriting, and his irrational, rambling young mind persisted in telling him that someone with that kind of penmanship should not have to be a whore.

  Then Stan got maudlin on him that same week, talking about his father in Ohio, his father’s new family, new life: respectable, pretty wife, two little girls, ranch-style home with a fenced backyard. Stan had lived there for a year when his father was trying to straighten him out. But it had not worked. Like Richie in Lamont, Stan did not fit in the little Ohio town, and eventually he ran away back to Chicago. But he had liked it in Ohio; despite his tough, cynical exterior, he would have liked to fit.

  “It was quite a place,” he reminisced to Richie. “American Legion baseball games, Fourth of July parade and fireworks, town picnics, flags out on holidays. I wouldn’t have minded staying. But people would take one look at me and decide what I was. I never got invited nowhere the other kids did. Some parents even told their kids not to have nothing to do with me. So finally I just said fuck it and took off back here.”

  It was Stan’s disclosure about Ohio that compounded Richie
’s distress about Vernie. The way he looked at it, Stan should have been welcomed in Ohio by the same righteous set of rules that should have kept Vernie off the street corner. The goddamned world, he brooded, was uneven, unjust, and unfair. As his despair over it deepened, something happened that he did not expect: he became angry—angry as he had been in Lamont at the inequities there. Now he felt the same bitter resentment in Chicago, where he never expected it. Chicago, which had now made him prosperous, in a way; independent, in a way; free, in a way. Chicago, which had paid him back for all the hard times. Given him a place to be again.

  But, he eventually realized, at a very high price.

  He finally became aware that the city was breaking him. He was not reading anymore, not feeding his mind. With Stan and the other guys, he survived on instinct, like an animal; with Toni and the girls, he performed the same way. Intelligence played less of a part in his life every day. Just as he had once dreaded he would end up like Joey Lupo, endlessly playing checkers in Charleytown night after interminable night, so now he began to fear that he would end up like Vernie or Stan: nothing to sell but oneself, nothing to act on but raw nerve.

  Richie’s original plan had been to come to Chicago just for the summer. After falling back in with Stan again, he had changed his mind, not caring if he ever saw Lamont again. Now, when it should have been easier for him to make the decision to stay, when life was softer for him than it had ever been, he found that he could not do it. He wanted to go back. He was afraid not to. The only thing he hated about it was walking out on Stan . . . again.

  One day when they were lounging on a park bench, with no one else around, Richie finally told Stan the truth about being out of Charleytown for nearly a year, and living in Lamont. When he was finished, Stan looked at him astutely and said, “So why are you telling me now?” Richie shrugged and did not answer. “You’re going back, right?” Stan asked.

  Richie looked away. “I been thinking about it.”