by Packer, Vin
“After London.”
“New York’s bigger ‘n London! What are you, wise? It’s the biggest city in the world! And ask anyone in New York what it is to get wasted. They tell you.”
“I doubt it, Red Eyes. You forget New York extends below East Ninety-seventh for quite a way, and beyond that, west, south, and north. It’s not all the same.”
“Geez! Who needs a geography lesson!” Eyes gets up abruptly. “Okay, Dan,” he says, “so you don’t like my song. So you’re not with it. The Kings will sure be interested in this news, Detached Dan.”
“I hurt your feelings, so you threaten me. Is that it?” Dan scratches a match to light a cigarette. “I thought I could talk to you like a man, and that you could take it straight.”
“So what the hell!” Eyes stands sullenly; ashamed now of his behavior.
For a moment Dan Roan smokes silently, watching him without saying anything. Finally he swings his chair back to his desk, opens a drawer, takes papers from it and begins to work on them. Eyes moves slowly to the door. As his hand turns the knob, Dan says without looking up, “By the way, Eyes, you were going to let me know about Thursday night.”
Eyes tells him, “I ain’t made my mind up yet.”
“Well make it up — right now!” Dan says.
Eyes opens the door. Before he steps out of Dan’s office he mutters, “Okay. I’ll go to the goddam show. I’ll do you the favor. Can’t kill me!”
VII
A prerequisite to the understanding of the causation factor in delinquency is the acceptance of the fact that instincts inevitably strive for satisfaction whether socially acceptable or not. The instinctive urges of the juvenile delinquent are no different in this respect from the impulses of the law-abiding juvenile. It is the ego which decides which impulses may become overt, and the ego is guided in this decision by the demands of reality, and by the voice of the superego. The ego of the juvenile delinquent is still governed by the pleasure-principle, i.e., as a prerequisite to …
— FROM “ANTISOCIAL CAUSATION CLARIFIED,” PSYCHIATRIC BULLETIN, VOL. VII.
UP IN CENTRAL PARK there is a spot called Harlem Mere. You can sit on a bank up there under the trees on a hot afternoon, and if there is a breeze, you can feel it cool on your face; and if there isn’t, you can watch the lake water and imagine how it feels, and lean back, and pull up some grass, just wet from being hosed, and watch the rowboats bobbing on the lake. If it is a nice day, like this Tuesday afternoon, close to four, you can look up through green leaves and bark boughs and see the sky, all that blue and those clouds, and it isn’t bad at all — for New York near Harlem. It is as good a place as any to loaf around and talk with someone you like.
“… I mean, to hear it told, Nita, you’d think just because a guy belongs to a gang he’s some kind of hood, runs around cutting people up no reason. You know?”
Anita Manzi sits beside Gober, her raven-colored hair loose at her shoulders and falling on the white bareness of her skin. She wears a simple yellow dress which dips down her back, and in the front forms a V-neckline. She wears a thin strand of pearls, she is barelegged, and on her feet she wears rope sandals that tie around her ankles. Gober wears the Kings’ T-shirt, khaki pants, and sneaks without socks. Around his waist is the King garrison belt.
She says, “I just don’t see why you have to belong to a gang.”
“I don’t have to. I can be a creep, if I want to.”
“My brother doesn’t belong to any gang. My brother Al. He’s your age. And my brother Bob didn’t when he was your age. He’s going to be a doctor now. He’s swell, Gober. I wish you could meet him.”
“You talk like I never met anybody but the gang. I got a family too, you know. Brother in the Marines. Brother in business. Both highly respectable.”
“I didn’t mean anything by it, Gober. I just meant I wish you could meet Bob.”
“So maybe I will.”
“I told him about you, Gober. I tell him things I wouldn’t tell anyone else.”
“Don’t tell me someone in your family approves of me?”
“Well — ” Anita pauses, picks a blade of grass and sucks on it. “I just wish you didn’t have to be a King.”
“Look, Nita,” Gober says, “I don’t know nothing about where you live — up on Ninety-fifth Street. We live only a few blocks from each other, but I don’t know nothing about your street. It’s the difference between two worlds. I think about that sometimes. I even figured out just when the difference begins. I figured out it’s got to do with the trains. You know all the way on up to where I live, they run underground, and all their soot and dirt stays under the earth. But just when they get right to where I live, those trains come shooting up out of the ground and run in the open; and they spit all over me, and people ‘at live where I do. And that’s the difference. The trains run in the open in places where it doesn’t matter a damn ‘bout the people there!”
A plane roars overhead, and three little Negro kids with sticks climb down a bank opposite Gonzalves and Anita, singing, “Davy, Davy Crockett!” Anita touches Gober’s wrist with her long fingers, very lightly, saying nothing, but watching his petulant profile.
“And that’s what I mean, I guess,” Gober continues. “We don’t live in the same world. If this was one of those soap-box operas, you’d be a rich dame on Park Avenue or something, and I’d be a nothing. But you’re not rich, and I’m not nothing. I’m a gang leader. They don’t just grow on trees. You don’t just get born one. And maybe the Kings aren’t angels — maybe not — but they stick together, and nobody puts anything over on them.”
Gober looks down at her then, at her eyes, and at her hand on his wrist. He murmurs, “Don’t you see, Nita?”
“But if you didn’t belong to a gang,” she says quietly, “then maybe we wouldn’t have to sneak around to see each other and — well, you know, Gober. If you — ”
“Yeah,” Gober groans, “if I didn’t belong to a gang. If I didn’t live on the wrong side of the street. If I wasn’t a spic — ”
“Don’t say that, please.”
“Well, I am a spic. What the hell!”
“You say it as though it was something bad to be, and that’s why it’s all right for you to lead a gang and have those wars and all.”
“Wars are the least of it! What do you think, it’s all rumbles?”
“I don’t know what it is. It’s something I don’t know about. Neither of my brothers ever had to be in a gang. Bob’s going to be a doctor and Al’s going to take over the luncheonette some day.”
“Okay,” Gober says. “So I don’t have any luncheonette to take over. So I don’t have the brains to be no doctor.”
“You’re smart, Gober. You are! I know that.”
Gober laughs and presses her hand in his. He says, “Oh, boy, am I smart!” and they sit there holding hands, the muggy May air pressing in on them. They sit watching the scene before them. There are others in Harlem Mere sitting just like Gonzalves and Anita, or walking along leisurely, or lying with half their bodies exposed to the sun, spread out on the grass, or just standing around doing nothing. They watch and keep their hands in one another’s; and after a while, in a low, steady voice, Gober starts to talk.
“I’m smart, all right. You should see my grades. You should see everything said in school just going right over my head. What do I know?” He laughs. “My mama, she tells me, ‘Be good, Riggie, finish school, Riggie. Don’t be like us, your pa and me. Look where we are today. Get an education, Riggie. Be smart. Don’t be like us.’ Well, I am like them! I’m their kid, and I’m like them! I know I am! Every time in geometry, English, science, I get an assignment, I know I’m dumb — real dumb. I don’t have the sense to learn. I’m like my ma, who can’t even learn any English, cause she just don’t know how. I’m like that. And you know something else?”
“What?”
“Ever go inta one of these drug stores, see the quarter novels there?”
“Yeah?”
“Gober, Gober — I don’t know what to say when you talk like that. I want to cry or something.”
Gober says, “I want you to know the way it is with me, that’s all. I don’t want to fool you, Nita.”
“I know, Gobe,” she says softly, squeezing her hand inside his.
“I’m no hood, but I’m no doctor. My family don’t know much up in this country, but they did. My mama used to dress swell — like you. We’re not spics. We’re Puerto Ricans come here because we’re citizens here. We’re citizens here! My mama and papa got as much right here as yours — ”
“Mine immigrated here, Gobe, too,” Anita says, smiling up at him. “They had to wait to become citizens. I’d like your folks. I would, Gobe.”
“You want to meet them?”
“When?”
“Right now! Right now! We’ll go over right now and you can meet them!”
Anita glances at the cheap gold watch on her wrist. She bites her lips and shakes her head. “I can’t. I have to be at work in a half an hour.”
“Then tomorrow!” Gober is insistent. “This time tomorrow!” His voice still contains a note of angry resentment, and a hint of his belief that he will be rejected by Anita Manzi.
Instead, he hears her say, “All right, Gober. Sure! Sure, I’d like that.”
“You would?” He looks at her with incredulousness.
“Yes, Gober. Yes.” She smiles at him; and there is something about her eyes that is beautiful, that Gober memorizes, that quiets him, makes him feel peace. Gober grins down at her. “I’ve never brought an amante home before,” he tells her.
“An amante?”
“You know — a — ” Gober is embarrassed, “a girl friend.” He says the last words very fast, and looks away from her.
“Really, Gober?” “Never!”
“Will it be all right?”
“Sure,” he says happily, “sure it will. Mama will be surprised!” He chuckles, tossing his head back, a lock of his black hair falling on his forehead. “Mama will think I must have got you pregnant,” he laughs. “Mama will think we must be going to have to hitch up!”
• • •
High up in a duplex overlooking Fifth Avenue, Nothin’ Brown stands in Mr. Morganhotter’s bedroom. He has been sent up there by his mother to pack in the laundry bag all of Mr. Morganhotter’s dirty shirts, and he is taking his time carrying out this order, for he knows the Morganhotters have hot-foot it off to abroad on the Queen Elizabeth last week.
Nothin’ ambles over to the bureau and sets on top of the glass there the tomato he has been chewing. Then he walks around and around, saying to himself, “Man oh man this here is the berries; this here is big man’s turf, and that’s a fact!”
Nothin’ sees a cane in a stand full of canes, pulls it out and gives it a twirl, and struts and giggles, and raps an end table with it. “Atten’shun, Kings of the Earth!” he says. “I’m a gonna call this here meetin’ in orders. And first things on the agenda first.”
Nothin’ strolls smartly across to a chaise longue and picks a silk necktie off the arm; he puts it around his neck. Then he sees a Homberg on a velvet-covered chair near the bed; this he slaps on the back of his head, still twirling the cane. He saunters in a circle and stops before a full-length mirror, pointing the cane at himself.
“On the agenda first,” he says, “is the fact since I become a big man, you Kings been cruisin’ me to join your old gang. Well, as you know, I put you down every time, and I don’t have to spell that out for you. On the agenda second,” he says, “is the fact that Gober, King of Kings, been taken sick and his sickness got to do wid the fact that I put you down, and Gobe always been my bestest fren, and I don’t want nothin’ to happen him. On the agenda third — ” Nothin’ taps his cane three times on the floor — ”is a fact I agree to join this here Kings of the Earth gang, and that’s a fact.”
Nothin’ Brown smiles and bows to the applause he hears ringing in his ears.
“And now, Kings,” he says, “I got cut out on you cause I got an appointment — ”
“You got an appointment, all right, Junior Brown!” a voice shouts behind Nothin’. “You got an appointment wid de back of dis brush on the back of your be-hind, Junior Brown!”
Nothin’ jumps when he sees his mother. She looms toward him like a giantess, a hairbrush in her hand. “Lookit your greasy hands on Mr. Morganhotter clothes! You got appointment, all right, Junior Brown. You gonna meet wid it right now!”
“You don’t have spell that out for me,” Nothin’ says, “Noooo, ma’am!”
And dropping the cane, Nothin’ bolts past his mother, out the room, pausing only long enough to grab his tomato off Mr. Morganhotter’s bureau.
Goddam, Tea thinks, that idiot preacher got a prayer meeting every night the week! Tea stands before the storefront church on 116th Street. In the window is a crudely painted sign:
RONE’S ROAD TO HEAVEN.
COME IN AND GET ON THE RIGHT TRACK.
HEAVEN IS GRANDER THAN NEW YORK,
AND IT IS GRANDER THAN RICHMOND,
CHARLESTON, OR NEW ORLEANS.
IT IS SO GRAND!
ITS STREETS ARE GOLD!
Tea looks at the clock in the window of the church, a big round one with blue lights and gold hands, telling eight o’clock now.
From inside the church a chorus of lusty voices are singing:
No, I don’t care,
No, I don’t care,
Don’t care where you bury
my body My little soul gwine rise and shine!
Service going to last another hour, Tea bets. Can’t hang around out front. Draw attention. Go on inside and sweat it out. Jesus! Tea walks through the door, past the preacher’s sitting room with its stuffed divans, camp chairs, and walls covered with plastic crosses and more hand-painted signs:
JESUS, I GOT MY TICKET FOR THE TRAIN!
LORD, HEAR ME WHEN I SING!
HEAVEN IS MY HOME, LORD, TAKE ME THERE!
At the entrance to the next room, the room of God, there is a black curtain pulled to. Where the curtain meets the dirty floor, there is painted in faded gold letters: Yes, you are on your way to heaven! Tea goes in to heaven.
Heaven is a large, square room with red satin curtains hanging ceiling to floor, all the way around. Chairs placed in rows face the front where stands a wooden platform, shaped like a half-moon and covered with yellow satin. On the platform is a cylindrical pulpit, painted black, with the words Jesus Saves written across it in gold. Preacher Rone, a giant-sized, dark-skinned Negro, wearing a robe cut from the same satin as the curtains, and with a gold monk’s cap on his head, leads the singing in heaven, stomping out the time with beats on the platform. A couple dozen members of heaven rock in their seats and cry out the song:
When I git to heaven,
Gwine ease, ease,
Me and my Lord goin’ do as we please
Sittin’ down side of the lamb!
Tea stands in the back of heaven, under the big black wire fan blowing warm air around the room.
Preacher Rone shouts, “Where you wanna go?”
The congregation calls back to him, “Heaven, Lord! Heaven!”
The preacher slaps his hands and sings:
I wants to go to heaven (slap, slap)
Have some angel wing (slap, slap, slap)
The congregation bursts out: “See de King Jesus — De Jesus King — ”
>
“And do what?” Preacher Rone shouts.
“Do what de angels do, Lord!” is chorused back.
Preacher Rone says, “Sing it!”
Shout like de angels shout
Set in de angels seat
Eat what de angels eat….
Tea moves over to a bench in a corner under the fan and sits wiping his perspiring face. Song after song he sits through. Heaven is busting its gut tonight! Everyone got to say a prayer himself, standing up while the rest clap and inject “Yes, Lord;” “Tell the Lord;” “You know, you know;” “That’s true, Lord, hear him!” Tea tries to sleep, but can’t. He thinks: Preacher got a good racket. Used to be subway conductor, then decide to be preacher. People believe anything, you put God on the end of it.
“And the Lord — ”
“Oh, yes — ”
“He say — ”
“He said it — ”
“Ha! Gwine be — ”
“Tell it!”
“A judgment day!”
Gets hotter and louder in heaven. Some heaven! Can’t hear yourself think, f’Chrissake. Everybody livin’ it up. Gettin’ with it. Flippin’ all over the place. Preacher doin’ all right. Pass the hat between sets. Give him the bread money cause he say he God.
“Tomorrow night!”
“Tomorrow night!”
“Ain’t gwine sin!”
“Ain’t gwine sin!”
“Gwine come right in!”
“Gwine come right in!”
“Into my heaven!”
“Into my heaven!”
“Round half-past seven!”
“Round half-past seven!”
This is the windup for the last pitch. Tea is soaking with sweat. Lord, that preacher won’t ever come off it, even when he’s building down. Eight-forty-five. Still all stomping their feet. God, God!
Heaven is breaking up at last, people filing out. Some stragglers lag to tell the preacher their problems. “Bring ‘em to the Lord,” he says.
“You convinced me tonight, Preacher Rone. Ain’t never gonna steal no more.”
