Young and Violent

by Packer, Vin

  “I said to say that crazy Spanish, dad,” Pontiac answers. “Besame el culo,” Tea whines sickly. “Pontiac, you let him get away with that?” Bull Rossi laughs.

  “I can’t take this act,” a Jungle says. “It’s too hairy. Cold turkey hits me right where I live!”

  “There’s a purpose behind everything, cats,” Pontiac tells them. “I just want to see this cat can take orders when he needs the birdie powder. Well, Perrez,” Pontiac says, “repeat what you said.”

  Perrez cries out the Spanish.

  “Kiss mine!” Pontiac roars. “C’mon, dad, I gave you a command.”

  Tea struggles toward him, his eyes brimming over with moisture, his nose like a dripping faucet.

  “Get on your knees, dad,” Pontiac tells him, “You want a courage pill, you gotta earn it!”

  Tea starts to bend his knees. Suddenly, without a word of warning, he falls back and sprawls on the floor. Body twitching, hands ripping at his clothing, he tears under his shirt, raking his chest with dirty fingernails until his flesh is clawed red and beginning to bleed. Bull Rossi moves fast, running to the second room, returning with the tools of relief — the spoon, the eyedropper, the water, the match, the needle, and the flake from the tall white horse. While the Jungles watch, Bull deftly performs this service to the dope-starved body of Perrez.

  “I think we won’t have any goofing from this cat,” Pontiac says dryly.

  Slowly, Perrez pulls himself to a sitting position. He begins to change back to a human being. Gradually the wild, rolling eyes become calm, the body quiet, its twitching gone. He pulls himself to a chair a Jungle shoves at him, and sits back.

  Pontiac takes a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, and hands one to Tea, who takes it gratefully. Tea stares at his ripped shirt and scratched skin, and smokes the cigarette with his head down, not looking at any of the Jungles.

  Pontiac says to Bull Rossi, “You are a very excellent skin-popper, dad!”

  Rossi grins, gratified at the approval he has won from his leader.

  “Okay, Perrez,” Pontiac says, “it ought to be clear now. You came here cause you used up all the dealers, right, dad? By now you got the news I’m top dealer and I’m working all over this end of town. It ought to be clear now. In case it isn’t, we’re going to keep you around overnight, and Bull here’s going to baby-sit with you tomorrow. Tomorrow night we got sort of a scheduled performance for you, and if you cooperate, you’ll get the hop you was just now itching for and wetting your pants over, see, Perrez?”

  Tea nods. “Yes.”

  “That glow you got gigging around in you now last you about seven hours, huh, dad?” “Six or seven,” Tea says.

  “Well, we’ll keep fixing you through the day, dad. But you remember something,” Pontiac warns. “If you don’t do your number as planned tomorrow night, you’re gonna be right where you are now. Six or seven hours from hell, dad. Six or seven hours from hell.”

  In the basement of the station house, a detective works on the bleary-eyed, heavy-lidded man picked up for questioning.

  “I got all night, bastard!” he growls, “so I’ll just wait till you’re ready to clear up this lousy story you tell!”

  “What I tell is the truth,” the man persists with a stale whisky breath.

  The detective says, “Your story stinks! I know stories, all kinds, and you tell the kind that stinks. Start over again. When did you see her jump?”

  “I was going up for air.”

  “I know that! You said that! You said you saw her and you said hello to her, and she sounded depressed.”

  “That’s right. That’s right. It’s like I said.”

  The detective kicks the chair the man slumps in. “No, bastard, it’s not like you said. You said you didn’t say anything to her. You said it all happened too quick. You said you didn’t even get near enough to call!”

  The man holds his head. “I’ll get you for this treatment. I’ll call the newspapers!”

  “I’d like to really work you over, bastard! Don’t think I wouldn’t!”

  “I want a glass of water. I got a right to have one!”

  “Sure, sure. You got a lot of rights. You got the right to stick by what you said. You said she was depressed — that she sounded depressed. Right?”

  “She did.”

  “What’s depressed mean?” “She didn’t say it. She just said hello.” “You said she didn’t say anything to you.” “I’m mixed up!”

  “Did she or didn’t she say anything?”

  “I remember now. She didn’t. She was sitting there — ”

  “Sitting?”

  “I couldn’t see whether she was sitting or standing, and — ”

  The assistant D.A. cuts into the conversation, opens the door and and tells the detective, “Forget it!” “Yeah?”

  “She came out of the coma. They thought she was swearing. She was saying, ‘No, Jesus, no!’ “

  “That’s him?” the detective points to the man.

  “Yeah. And there were bruises she didn’t get falling off a roof. All along her arms. Probably backed off — scared.

  Panicked and stepped back too far! Anyway, you were right. It was no suicide, but she was pregnant.”

  Ventura jerks erect in the chair. “She was what?”

  “She had one in the oven,” the detective snarls at him. “I suppose you don’t know anything about that either! Bastard!”

  Ventura clenches his fist. “That little bastard!” he shouts. “I’ll get him. I’ll kill him!”

  The assistant D.A. says, “You’ve done your share of that, Ventura.” To the detective he says, “She died at two-fifty. Intracranial hemorrhage. Book him on homicide.”

  XII

  TEEN-AGE TOUGHS BEAT MAN; WRECK CAFE

  According to police, four teen-age toughs slugged Michael Manzi, 60, of 130 E. 95 St., last night and then went about wrecking the luncheonette he operates at 2017 Madison Avenue. Manzi, taken to a hospital for treatment and subsequently released, reported the teenagers surprised him by hiding in his luncheonette a little before closing time. After punching him once or twice “for kicks,” and slashing, breaking, and tipping over everything in view, they knocked Manzi cold and left him bleeding and unconscious on the floor. Patrolman Thomas Baird spotted Manzi when he passed the luncheonette and noticed the open door. Manzi said the leader of the foursome called them “Jungles,” which is the name of a gang of East Harlem teenage thugs.

  — THE NEW YORK JOURNAL

  THAT DAY, Gober does not go to school. He polishes and cleans a Smith & Wesson, up in the clubroom of the Kings of the Earth. The gun belongs to an absentee member of the gang, Polo Rice, who is a sophomore, studying currently at Warwick reformatory. Even though it is a part of the King’s arsenal, it is seldom carried during rumbles. Tonight, however, Rigoberto Gonzalves would feel naked without it. He is that bugged.

  It was while he was on his way to school that he learned what the Jungles had done. It was a Jungle himself who tipped him off, a Jungle named Blackie Buttoni, who swaggered up to him on the corner of 100th and Park, and said he’d want to know, wouldn’t he, that a job was done last night on a certain soda fountain that specialized in sweets Gober was partial to? Gober didn’t believe him. How would he know a thing like that unless he’d done it? It was some kind of big gas Blackie was pulling, Gober thought, and later when he collided with Braden, Braden agreed with Gober.

  “I didn’t hear anything about it,” he’d told Gober, “but if you’re rifty, why’nt you check?”

  Gober said why should he be rifty over it, even if it was straight dope?

  Then he blew a dime on a phone call at a cigar store a block from the school. If he got an answer, he’d hang up. Couldn’t be a real job if the place was working the morning after. When he got the dime back, he chucked his books under the seat in the booth, and took off up Madison.

  At noon the early editions of the evening papers gave the story, but Gober had figured
it out before that. He didn’t need to read the Jungle credit line.

  For a couple of hours he waited around the recess yard at Anita’s school, and after the lunch break, he saw her and she spoke to him.

  She said, “It’s your fault, isn’t it, Gober?”

  “It wasn’t the Kings,” he told her.

  “I know that,” she said, “but it was aimed at the Kings — at the King of Kings. Am I right, Gober? Have I learned all the lessons you taught me about gangs to come up with the right solution, Gober?”

  Gober just stood there. He couldn’t look at her. Pretty soon she walked away, so he didn’t have to….

  Now he sits on an orange crate in the cellar, fondling the Smith & Wesson the way he has been for hours. The late afternoon sun sneaks in through the broken window and throws a spotlight on the dust-spotted, butt-covered floor. A few Kings straggle in to leave their rumble gear, select their weapons and lay it with their gear, and hurry on out to the streets, or Dirty Mac’s, or the pool hall, or home to brush up their sweet clothes for the dance tonight. Most of them have hangovers so their palaver is not any more enthusiastic than Gober’s clipped responses.

  “Hi, Gobe.”

  “Blitz.”

  “Everything set for tonight?” “All set.”

  “You packing a piece, Gobe?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Geez! This’ll be a big one!”

  “That’s right, Heads, a big one!”

  “You talk to Babe, Gobe? She gonna be with us?”

  “Doesn’t matter. We’ll just go through the formalities.”

  “Anyone seen Eyes? You seen him, Gobe?”

  “No.”

  Braden says, “Eyes’ll be on hand all right, don’t worry.” “And Tea?”

  “Probably still exploring snow country,” Braden says. “Can’t count on Tea.”

  “I don’t worry about Tea,” Gober says, “or any King! No King’s chickened yet, hophead or no!”

  The Kings of the Earth know that Gonzalves is his old self again.

  • • •

  Nothin’ Brown is also on the hook from school today. Not by choice. Tied by clothesline to a chair in the Morganhotter’s kitchen, he watches the huge and broad behind of his mother as she bends down to reach the bottom shelf of the refrigerator. He squirms and wiggles inside the rope, trying to make it give, so he can get free and go find Gober, and tell him what he knows. It’s a mission that has got to come off, no matter what Pontiac does to him, no matter even if he wastes him, because there’s one thing Nothin’ Brown is that maybe nobody figured on. He is loyal. He is also bound tightly to that goddam chair.

  His mother wipes the shelf out with a wet rag and turns the knob to “defrost.” She says, “You is the bane my existence. I ask God only las’ night what it is I ever done to deserve a chile ‘at stay out two clock in the A.M. an’ come home an’ say he been no place when I ask him where he been. Only las’ night I ask God just to tell me what I done deserve you, Junior Brown!”

  “Yeah? What God say?”

  “He say he wish he knew, too.” Mrs. Brown empties the cube tray and continues her dissertation.

  Nothin’ lets her keep on talking like that, because when she talks she doesn’t listen, and he eyes a paring knife on a table not far away. He could inch that chair over there, maybe, and get the thing in his mouth. He could hold it with his teeth and saw himself out of the bonds.

  • • •

  The whole time he has been telling Dan Roan about it, he has kept soiled hands, tracked with wet tears, covering his face, so that from the moment he began until now, Roan has not really seen the expression there. Now when he pauses, to pull the ripped and soggy Kleenex from his back pocket, he shows his face, and Dan Roan sees better than he could ever see anywhere the face of a defeated King. It is a face he has never seen before.

  “… and so,” Red Eyes says, “that’s what happened. That’s why I called, Dan.”

  Roan tells him, “I’m sorry; I wanted to come. I let you down, I know, but — ”

  “No. No.” Eyes wipes his nose. “It wouldn’t have done no good anyway. I was just — I don’t know — just like somebody not in his mind, see? I couldn’t believe — I just didn’t know who to say anything to — I kept thinking if I could say something I could make it different. But, there was her old man there, telling everybody he was gonna kill Uncle Jesus. And my old lady! What a laugh! She says they still gotta pay the rent like Lorry and her uncle was there until two others take their place. She says that when we come from the hospital. That’s her news then.”

  “And no one knows the baby was yours?”

  “No. Whatsa difference? They think like the police, that he done it — that he musta always been after her. Well, he was — but he never — ”

  “Eyes, I wish I could do something.”

  “Nobody can. Last night when I called you I thought maybe you could do something. I don’t know what the hell I thought you was supposed to be able to do.”

  Roan offers Red Eyes a cigarette, lights it, and lights one for himself. He says, “Eyes, I want to try to explain to you why I didn’t come. First, I had no idea what it was all about. My wife is pregnant. Remember I told you that at the theater. I felt that I — ”

  Eyes interrupts you. “You don’t have to make no excuses, Dan. I thought a lot about that too. I mean, you got something that’s yours, just like I had Lorry. I was always leaving her to be with the gang. I mean, she was what I had, and I was always running off.” He puts his hands over his face again, and pauses, his shoulders shaking with sobs he can’t control. Outside Dan’s office, the phonograph blares in the background. Tears pour through his fingers and put out the flame at the tip of the cigarette he clutches. Dan smokes and waits until Eyes can continue.

  Eyes says, “I was such a kid, and here’s Lorry knocked up — and me talking about songs I’m gonna write. Big deal!”

  He drops the wet cigarette to the floor. “No, Dan, you were right not to come. I’d never say that, I guess, but I know a lot of things now I didn’t know before. I thought and thought, all last night and all today. She was what I had that was mine. The only goddam thing that was mine!”

  In his lap he holds his gang jacket. He fingers it and laughs, crying at the same time. “What a King I am now without her, huh? What a big man!”

  “Do the boys know, Red Eyes?”

  “Them? Hell! Whatta they know! They gotta rumble to worry about!”

  “And you’re not going to tell them?”

  “What would it mean? Some bim’s uncle tried to screw her and she fell off the roof and got wasted! They didn’t even know her. I never let them. She was mine, you know?”

  He slaps the jacket across the chair next to him. “I can tell you one thing, though. I ain’t gonna rumble. What do I wanna fight? Do I feel like fighting the whole world? Christ, I can chicken on the whole lousy world and it don’t even bug me, see? Because I already punked out on the world, if you know what I mean. A guy punks out on the only thing he has, what’s he care any more? It gonna bring Lorry back I go fight a Jungle? Who’m I fighting for I go fight a Jungle? The Kings? I ain’t no King. Where’s my goddam crown? On a lousy leather jacket! It ain’t on my head, is it? It’d fall in the goddam hole I got up there!”

  “Sounds like the rumble is any time now, hmm, Eyes?”

  Red Eyes looks up at Dan Roan. Red’s face is striped with finger marks and tear lines, his eyes a blur. A thin smile twists his lips, and his tangled brown hair falls across his forehead. “S’afternoon, when I was thinking,” he says, “I thought maybe some day I’d get a job like yours. I mean, I ain’t very bright or none of that, but I never had no reason listen in class. What was I supposed to hear? I thought s’afternoon, maybe your kinda job would suit me because I know things now I didn’t know. I thought of that, but I thought a lot of things. So I don’t know, and I don’t even know I ain’t gonna hang around with the Kings. I’m punking out on them
and they probably won’t want me around anyway. I don’t know no answers right now. I ain’t on anybody’s side, just like who’m I against? I don’t care. If the Kings wanta rumble, let ‘em, but I ain’t telling you what I know, Dan.”

  “That’s fair.”

  Eyes pulls himself to his feet. He tosses the Kleenex he holds in his hand into Dan’s wastebasket. “I ain’t going to take up all your goddam time with my sob story, Dan.”

  “Do you want to wash up or anything? Fix your eyes?”

  Eyes shakes his head. He says, “What the hell? They call me Red Eyes, don’t they?”

  XIII

  Your lips are the sweetest lips

  I’ve ever tasted

  For your lips, for your kiss,

  I’d even get wasted.

  — A RED EYES DE JARRO ORIGINAL.

  INSIDE the Aphrodite Ballroom that night at nine o’clock, there are more females than males. Half a dozen couples dance beneath the blue- and rose-colored bulbs strung from the high-ceilinged room by a wire. Their bodies undulate in time to the mambo played by a shirt-sleeved orchestra on the crepe-paper-decorated platform at the end of the hall. Around the refreshment stand opposite it, a cluster of girls, most of them with flowing skirts and tight bodices, feign interest in a hysterical conversation they pretend to be having, and eye the entrance on the one hand, and the tables along the wall on the other. At those tables sit more girls, a seemingly privileged group, for all wear white carnations in their hair and carry red leather bucket bags. Both gatherings of girls await the “fall-ins” of the Kings of the Earth, and the Jungles. Both wonder which fall-in will be the first, which the more fabulous.

  Marie Lorenzi sips a Coke through a straw, standing beside Babe Limon. In addition to these two, there are in this cluster Flo Wenzel, Birdie Lyon, Ellie Sarantio, Mildred Costello, and a few more friends, classmates of Marie and Babe, girls who have been coming to the Aphrodite the same as Marie and Babe have, every Friday night. Occasionally a stag approaches and asks one from this cluster for a dance, and the pair glide on to the floor, stay for a set, and then part. It is the Kings and the Jungles who solidify things once they arrive; and it is because they are known, by sight and reputation, if not by name, by all who regularly patronize the Aphrodite, that no stag approaches Baby-O. She is known to be the property of a gang leader, which stamps her inviolate to anyone but him.