Young and Violent

by Packer, Vin

At midnight it is dark now and damp. The rain has stopped. The streets are black and blue. Tea walks down Park to 99th, clutching tightly to the box he got at El Palacio. His eyes water and he keeps yawning, but he tells himself he can boot up now. He got what he set out for. The memory of how he got it swims like slime in his mind; and the song that was playing on the phonograph plays its tune wordlessly, endlessly, beats its rhythm as he goes home. In between booting, life is just songs whining out the blues. In between booting no matter where you are there is a song in the background that you owe your life to.

  Tea whistles it, trying not to yawn, his eyes all gooped up, dreaming of the great white mistress — snow arms that would be holding him soon, caressing him, giving him the gig. Down the crooked staircase he goes to the room in the basement; and he sees inside with the lights on, Salvadore Hostos sprawled on the bed, out, unconscious from some cheap corn that smells up the place. Tea goes past him to the dresser where he keeps the spoon, the needle, the eyedropper, and love in a capsule. He takes them and gets the water, hurrying. Then there is the sweet tension of the ritual; the match, the fluid like milk, and the jab in the thigh.

  “C’mon boot!” he grins, “Boot up. Bucket! Bucket!”

  And maybe a hundred years after that moment, Tea opens the little box he got at El Palacio, and he finds it stuffed to the top with lifesavers, and this note:

  Perrez — Along about now you need a lifesaver. Am I rite? We figgured you’d get to Hot Hazel’s in time, dad. That’s the last stop, isn’t it, dad. No more places. Unless you want to come into Jungle turf for a confab. And you can score in the deal. Yours truly, Pontiac.

  Tea crumples the paper up in his hand, and leans back on the bed snickering to himself. Christ, it makes him laugh. The whole thing. Now he is fresh out and it’s the big drought, but when he’s booting, everything makes him laugh. He’s even God a little.

  Tea closes his eyes, giggling.

  X

  I’d take a lickin’, dear

  I’d chicken, dear

  I’d punk out without any fear

  If you would only say “I do”

  I’d do anything you wanted me to …

  — A RED EYES DE JARRO ORIGINAL.

  THURSDAY NIGHT.

  At a quarter to nine the lights dim in the St. James Theater, and the gay rhythm of the overture begins to build. Dan Roan sits in the balcony seat, not listening, his eyes fixed dully on the stage, without seeing the set as the curtain rises on it. There is a single word on his lips, a word less familiar to Roan than to Eyes, beside him — chicken. And this is what Roan wants to do — to chicken, to punk out, to leave the Kings of The Earth and the turmoil of their turf to some stronger zealot to resolve; to some bigger fanatic to try to handle and still have hope….

  Of course, Enid was ashamed after she had slept on her words. It was selfish, she had said, wrong, petty, not what she meant at all; but along with this guilt she carried, was the bulge beginning in her stomach that was something human they had created together. And now she sits at home with their child inside of her, repressing loneliness, resentment, anxiety, and the memory of a perfectly reasonable cry of protest she had made the night before. And because Dan Roan cannot let a King down — because under the law a delinquent on probation must be accompanied by a responsible adult after ten at night — Red Eyes de Jarro sits beside him, a tough kid who feels undressed without a switch-blade knife, a gang boy who would rather kill a rival in cold blood than chicken on a rumble, and a fifteen-year-old who unwittingly fathered a bastard.

  This is a job a man can be proud of? A job that pays little in cash, and less in consolation? A job that keeps him going down the depressed streets of his boyhood, searching for those boys — any one of whom might live out his adult life in Leavenworth — just as the father of Dan Roan did — trying to reason with them and find reasons for them? A job that forces him to neglect the one person in his life he loves?

  “Geez, Dan, this is swell!” Red Eyes intrudes on Dan’s thoughts, nudging him with his elbow, whispering.

  “Yeah,” Dan responds glumly. “Swell!”

  Impulsively, Eyes says, “And so are you.”

  “Huh?” Did he hear right?

  “So are you, for bringing me to it.” Eyes says. Well, that’s something.

  “Even though you did get the tickets for free,” Eyes adds.

  • • •

  Around the corner from the luncheonette that night at nine o’clock, Gober stands in a doorway, watching her approach. He lights a cigarette and glances at his watch. Up in the clubroom, he knows, the Kings of the Earth will be waiting for him. He has already sent Nothin’ Brown there to give the lookout, Owl, a message.

  She links her arm in his when she reaches him, and they go down East 96th to Fifth Avenue.

  “How much time do you have?” he asks her.

  “An hour or so. Pop thinks I’m visiting a girl friend.”

  “I have to tell you something, Nita, something that’s been bugging me. I gave it a lot of thought, and I come to a decision.”

  “Yes?”

  “Tomorrow night I can’t make it after all. I thought I could, but I can’t.”

  “Gober, you told me yesterday you’d make it. Yesterday you told me you didn’t want to have this fight, that you would tell your gang it was all off. I don’t understand any of this. None of it makes any sense at all to me, Gober — these wars and all this thinking about what’s the right thing to do or not. It’s not right to run around fighting. Can’t you see that?”

  They cross the street and walk to the benches along the wall near Central Park. Gober sits beside her, a frown wrinkling his forehead, his eyes looking at the cigarette burning between his fingers. She sits sideways, facing him, an expression of sad confusion clouding her lovely face.

  “Listen, Nita,” Gober begins, “while I try to explain to you why I can’t chicken, and I know now for sure I can’t. I’d like to meet your brother — that would be swell, but — ”

  “Gober, it isn’t just because I want you to meet Bob. I don’t want you to fight. I don’t want you to be written up in the newspapers like a tough fellow that runs around with gangs. I — ”

  “You got to hear me out, Nita, for once and for all. I run with a gang, and that’s the way everybody I know runs — in gangs. I don’t only run with it, and all — I lead it. I boss it! Now, you got a family and you got brothers and sisters, and I got that too; at least I got brothers, see? But mine’s not like yours. Sure, I like them all right, and I’m not treated bad by ‘em, and we get along. But we don’t know each other so well. I mean, we don’t have no business we all work at, or anything like that. You say your pop’s business he worked hard for, and all of you did, and, well, in a way, it’s the same with the Kings.

  “See, Nita, we were just little nothings, like Nothin’ Brown, for instance, who didn’t belong nowhere in particular at any special time; and some of us, a whole lot of us, didn’t even know the place we lived around. I mean, it was strange. You’re born in this country, so it smells like your country, but when I first come here, the only thing smelled like my home was our lousy kitchen. It didn’t smell or sound or look like anything but a big nowhere we was all lost in. Like a bunch of pins in a lousy haystack. Gradually we get to know a couple fellows live around us. Some that were from parts where we were, others not. But we get familiar to each other, and we sort of get glad to see each other around, because we see a lot of others traveling around together — and we hear they got clubs. The Shining Knights, the Dragons, the Blue Beards — we hear those names, and we see those guys, and we know we’re different. I mean, they act like big guys, like they all got a secret they won’t tell us, and like they don’t need us to have a world. That’s the impression we get. They got the world, and we’re hanging on the fringes. We’re on the verge of it, but we’re not with it.

  “So we see their jackets, and things like Blue Beard tattoos, and the Knight caps, and stuff, and we say wh
at the hell, there’s enough of us to have our own damn club. I mean, we can have an even better club if we get organized. So we do — and that’s why we give ourselves that name — the Kings — because that’s the way it strikes us. We’re Kings, because we’re all in on it together. We got our own jackets, our place to meet, our ideas, our buddies who are going to stick with us and by us, and just, well, be Kings together.” “And fight?”

  “Yes, and fight when we have to. Yes, that’s part of it. What happens to countries that don’t fight for themselves? They get taken over and stepped on. The same with countries that don’t stay tough and strong, like my home — Puerto Rico. That’s why we’re nowhere today in the world, because we weren’t strong.”

  “America’s your country, Gober! You’re a citizen.”

  “I’m a citizen of the Kings of the Earth. That’s my country — our turf. That’s where I’m home most of all, in King turf. Not here on Fifth Avenue, or at your luncheonette, where I have to look around all the time to make sure your pop don’t see me, or at your doctor brother’s house with his fancy — ”

  “Fiancée.”

  “I can’t even say it. I don’t know about things like that. But Nita, I know the word loyalty, see? And responsibility. Those are big enough words for me … Tomorrow night a Jungle’s going to try to muscle in on something that’s King turf, just to see if we can hold our turf and things that belong with it. And for me to chicken, is for the Kings to lose their rep, a rep earned by ‘em, a rep that they gotta stand on, see? I mean, nobody’s got respect for a punk, and the punk hasn’t got any for himself — and he might just as well get wasted.”

  “Get wasted?”

  “Yeah, wasted. Just what it means: used up for no reason — killed.”

  “I can’t understand it, Gober, not any of it. It’s all gang stuff.”

  “Sure. I’m a gang guy. You got to appreciate that, Nita. First of all, I’m a gang guy.” “And I don’t matter?”

  “You matter, but you don’t figure. What I mean by that is, Nita, in my life not much about you figures. Look, you know how I feel about you. But where’s it gonna ever get me? I got to live where I live, and not forget guys I grew with — not grew up with, or anything as cozy, but grew with, see every day, talk the way they talk, laugh at the same things. I mean, how’s it going to be any different for me? Your old man would kill me he knew we were sitting here right now. And all we’re doing is talking about life and the way it works out.”

  “Then what’s going to become of us, Gobe?”

  “I don’t know, Nita. Why can’t we just try getting on the only way we can?”

  “Because I don’t want to pick up the papers and read about some boy I like and hear he’s doing things against the law. Or have him tell me his gang’s first.”

  “I go for you, Nita. I mean I even love you, or something.” Gober shakes his head, drops the cigarette on the ground and squashes it. “But I got to stick by the Kings.”

  “What if you get picked up tomorrow, taken in by the police? What if they want to know some information about your Kings?”

  “I wouldn’t tell them.”

  “That’s what I mean, Gober!” she cries. “You’re blind on this subject. It’s the Kings of the Earth against the earth. That’s the way it is.”

  “It’s the only thing I’m not blind about,” Gober answers. “The Kings are my world. They’re what I see when I look. Who’m I going to give away my world to? not anyone. Not the police, not anyone. Take a gang guy who won’t squeal to the cops. Right away he’s a juvenile delinquent a page high in headlines. But if he was a soldier, refusing to tell the enemy military secrets, he’d be a hero and they’d ride him down the avenue here. But both of them are doing the same thing — being loyal to what they know. You can’t chicken on it. I’d rather die than chicken on the Kings of the Earth!”

  Gober sighs and for the first time looks squarely at Anita Manzi. “Don’t you see?” he pleads. “I don’t want to chicken!”

  • • •

  At twenty minutes to ten that Thursday night, Owl pokes his head in the clubroom and states flatly, “He ain’t nowhere in sight. If you ask me, he ain’t comin’!”

  The basement is a bedlam. Since eight-thirty the Kings have awaited Gonzalves. Butt after butt is ground into the cement floor, and a veil of smoke hangs over the heads of the boys gathered there. Among them they pass a quart of cheap gin, drinking it straight from the neck of the bottle, cursing and conversing in their staccato way, teasing the tension in themselves to mold it into a whole, into a monster that is all of them put together, and the monster is mean and angry. Their shouts rise all at once, in terse, vexed tones, complaining at the betrayal of their leader.

  Then Braden stands and shouts, shaking his fists, with his face red from the blood rising up to it through his neck. “Silence! Shut up! Listen!”

  The Kings quiet.

  “Listen to me, all of you!” Braden stands in the center of the basement. “Gober has goofed! We’re all jammed up!”

  “Man, you can play that number again!” “Eighty minutes late!”

  “He’s not coming. He’s punking out. He’s hung up on that ice cream soda bim!” “He’s screwed us!”

  Braden bellows, “Will you listen? F’Chrissake, I got a suggestion. Will you listen, or will we all see each each other in hell?”

  “Let him talk!” Two Heads says.

  “Spill!” Blitz Gianonni agrees.

  Flash tells the others, “Give him a chance to have his say.”

  The room is Braden’s then. He can handle it. The gin is warm in his belly, sparkling words now that come out in cold, clipped sounds. He paces like Gober would, his thumbs caught in the belt loops on his trousers, his jaw thrust forward resolutely. “The consensus of opinion is,” he says dramatically, “that Gober isn’t showing up here for this meeting tonight. Furthermore, there is a consensus of opinion that two other very goddam important members of the Kings is also punking out of this pre-rumble confab — mainly Eyes and Tea.”

  Flash is cleaning his nails with a sharp-bladed hunting knife. He interrupts Braden. “I told you Eyes hadda go to the show with Roan. He sent word he’s with the rumble all the way, as outlined at the last session. I’m to let him know any changes.”

  Braden snaps, “And Tea?”

  Two Heads asks, “Where you think a hophead is when his handler cut out? Out trying to score somewhere!”

  “That’s my whole point in this consensus of opinion,” Braden says. “We’re coming apart at the seams, Kings. The sawdust is falling out. Here it is the night before a rumble, and our leader is playing potsy with some little Polack piece; one of our War Counselors is at a big bleed with a nosy social worker; and the other War Counselor is on the nod. What are we, f’Chrissake, a bunch of limp-wrist fags?”

  “Looks to me like Gober’s gonna chicken!” Blitz Gianonni mutters.

  Two Heads whines, “Dear Emily Post, lately I am sleeping in a tent over a broad who fries eggs in a luncheonette. Please advise me what there is I can do about this situation!”

  “Eyes ain’t punking,” Flash says. “Gober and Tea I don’t know about, but Eyes is in all the way across the board!”

  Braden snaps his finger at a King who holds the gin bottle. He tips it and swallows, hands it back to the King, and demands silence again. Then after more pacing, and after looking around slowly at the excited faces of the others, he says, “To sum up, men! This is the deal! We decided couple days ago a rumble is got to come off, right?”

  “Right!”

  “And Gober was in. He was with it like all the rest. Right?” “Right!”

  “So word spreads, see, the way word does. The Jungles know we’re rumbling, though they are ignorant as to the facts that we’re giving them the jap. But they expect us to rumble, and tomorrow night is when we planned, immediately after the dance. Right?”

  “Right!”

  “But Gober is all jazzed up in the real way
over this bim. This is not like Gober, and our leadership is weak. We don’t even know if it’s there at all. It’s a serious thing to say a man will chicken, and I don’t say Gober will, but I don’t say neither that Gober won’t. A guy with the ga-ga juices mixing it up inside of him is no more responsible than Tea with the snow passion. And Gober is not himself. We hardly seen him all week. Right?”

  “Right!”

  Two Heads snarls, “What we need maybe is a new King of Kings.”

  “Look, Heads,” Braden says, “whether that is what we need or not is not what we treat here in this meeting tonight. What we got to decide is how to get Gober back in on this rumble with his old heart beating in time, instead of all off half-cocked like he is now. We can’t afford changing boats in the middle of the river. Our rep would be ruined, word got around our leader punked. We’d be worth half the price of a grind girl, word ever got out Gobe chickened. I mean, Gobe’s got to show up at the dance and go through the formalities of the grudge, otherwise we got no style. What we got to do is devise a scheme to make Gober want to rumble more than rub up against that bim. Right?”

  Two Heads says, “What you gonna do, cut it off him?”

  “You listen to what I thought up in relation to this subject, men,” Braden says, “for I think I have a scheme that will work on Gober and bring him back to the fold — but fast! And also — Blitz, will you kindly pass me the gin? — also this plan is not going to harm our morale. Things have been a little dull of late, and we might as well just work up to tomorrow’s adventure in Rumblesville with a little target practice of some kind — just to more or less unify us Kings of the Earth!” Braden pauses, lifts the bottle Blitz passes forward, swallows a good three shots, and draws a deep breath before he says, “Okay, here’s the strategy….”

  • • •

  On the roof, near the drainpipe, a spotted cat has a dead rat. A wedge of light from the door behind her holds the darkness away from Dolores Ventura’s outline, as she leans against the brick wall and worries. It is hard for her to believe that there is life in her womb, though the sickness of it has sent her to the employees’ washroom mornings, and the anxiety over it has left her sleepless. This morning a bland priest with sinus trouble blew his nose through her confession of the sin; said for her to say her “Hail Mary,” and go home and tell her mother and father immediately; said to remember the child is a Catholic; and said to sin no more but grieve at such a sin as this. And behind her in the line, others waited to unburden themselves with things they had done wrong — failure to pray, denial and doubts of God, cursing, missing Mass, thoughts, words, or actions.