“What’s happenin’?” Wedo asked, disconcerted. “Somethin’ wrong?”
“Let’s split. I don’t wanna go in there.”
“What, man? Are you crazy?”
“Forget it. Come on.” He started walking away, and Wedo had to follow. Alex wouldn’t have explained everything no matter where they were, but in the alley’s quietness the men by the door would hear every word: they kept him from talking, and Wedo from asking, until they were back on the street.
“What happened to you?”
“Too many niggers around,” Alex lied, deliberately making his voice hard to shut off Wedo’s probes. It was easier than trying to explain a complex truth he didn’t understand. As much as anything else in the world (or almost), he wanted to fuck a girl. Even the imagining of it got his prick hard. He knew what fucking was, the thing itself, but he was also certain there was more to it than that; he’d read as much via allusion and euphemism. It didn’t tell him enough to help, just enough to establish his ignorance. What he needed was a girl near his own age, as inexperienced as himself, so she wouldn’t know he was learning.
Without discussion they had automatically turned back toward Main Street.
“Well, whaddya wanna do?” Wedo asked.
“I’m following you.”
“Let’s go check Hank out, see if he’s through, maybe cruise around. Say, you ever roll any fruiters?”
Alex shook his head.
“We can make some bread strong-arming them. Me and Hank have done it before. We pick ’em up in a couple of public toilets—one in Pershing Square, the other one in the P.E. depot on Sixth and Main. One of us goes down and stands at the pisser, fakin’ like he’s pissing. Just look around, and some pervert’ll give you the eye. They just wanna suck a dick … anywhere. So whoever gets one takes him to an alley, or up on Angel’s Flight, and whoever is waitin’ follows until the spot is right. We kick the motherfucker’s ass and take his bread. You for that?”
Ashamed of backing out at the nightclub, Alex was anxious to show his guts. “Sure, man, that sounds all right.” He answered without thinking, not that reflection would have changed his answer; it might have instilled some misgivings, however.
* * *
Hank wasn’t enthusiastic, at least not for that night. He had a girl to meet and enough money for the moment.
It was nearly midnight when Wedo and Alex came out of the Examiner building.
“What now?” Wedo said. “I’m tired.”
“Me, too. I don’t have anywhere to go.”
“I could go … home,” Wedo said, but then patted Alex’s back in comradeship. “If you could call the nasty motherfucker that.” He choked the words out with false levity. “But I don’t feel like it. Lots of times I don’t.”
“So where do you sleep?”
Wedo shrugged. “Here and there. At Hank’s sometimes. His mother likes me. Sometimes at Teresa’s … sneak by her father and go upstairs … and sometimes in an all-night flick on Main Street. Wanna try that?”
“Sure, man.”
Thus was it decided, and in ensuing weeks they would spend several nights in one triple-feature movie theater or another, always sitting adjacent to an exit in case the cops who scanned the place from the door started down the aisles. The all-night theaters closed about six-thirty, dumping their creatures into the daylight and the rising city, where they were lost amid the swarm.
On the morning following that first night, they also established another pattern they would repeat. They took an old yellow streetcar to JoJo’s and Teresa’s, waiting with hands jammed in their pockets and vapor coming from their mouths until old man Altabella drove off to work. Alex’s new clothes were in the house. He bathed and changed while Wedo walked Teresa to school.
JoJo was still snoring when his buddies showed up, but when Wedo returned from the walk, JoJo was perfecting his ducktail and was ready to go.
Both Alex and JoJo had money left from the smoke-bomb caper, so they paid for the marijuana, wine, and the gasoline for Hank’s car. The quartet drove to the beach, but it was off-season and bleak and empty. Even the hot-dog stands were shut down. Alex felt good just riding around in the back seat, looking at things. JoJo was beside him, while Wedo rode in front with Hank. The wine and weed opened shutters in Alex’s mind, making him think and feel with unusual intensity. Colors could be felt, music seen, each piano note hanging individually before his mind’s eye. He knew he would get busted sooner or later and would have to go back to jail. The awareness of that always lurked on the fringe of his consciousness. He also knew what most people thought when they looked at four youths with greasy ducktails and thick-soled shoes: distaste laced with apprehensiveness. It wasn’t ideal, but it was better that than the way they fucked him around. He really liked his new buddy, Wedo; Hank, too, except that the latter was taciturn by nature and hadn’t opened up yet, though a wink and a grin told Alex he was accepted.
On the drive back to the city, they took winding Sunset Boulevard. For much of its length it was lined with large, beautiful homes. They had various architectural styles, but white was the prevalent color, and they were all nestled in greenery. All four youths were awed, and when they neared the turnoff through the Bel Air gates, Wedo wanted to turn in and cruise around.
“It’s a free country, ain’t it? That’s a public street, que no?”
“Let’s keep going,” Alex said. “We stand out too much to be cruisin’ around in there. We’ll get pulled over, sure as shit. Me and JoJo are wanted.”
“We stand out here, too,” Wedo argued.
“Yeah, but this is a big main drag. That ain’t the same as up there. First one of those rich people sees us out the window, they’ll call the police about the zoot-suiters or something. And the cops work for them.”
Wedo finally nodded. “Yeah, you’re right.”
Being thus validated, Alex felt even better. He leaned back and scanned the mansions of Beverly Hills, wondering what the odds were for him to ever have such a place; how did people get so rich? It was beyond his dreams, which ended at a new convertible and sharp clothes—a double-breasted one-button roll in sharkskin.
* * *
That night Wedo borrowed Hank’s car. They went to a Billy Eckstine concert at the Million-Dollar Theatre. JoJo had a girl to take, and Wedo had Teresa. Alex didn’t want to go, but on Wedo’s urging, he dressed up and went along. Eckstine was the favorite singer in the barrios and ghettos of Los Angeles.
Afterward they went cruising, stopping at a drive-in for hamburgers, then up into the Hollywood Hills to follow Mulholland Drive along the winding crest. They could see the city spread out to the far horizon. Everyone but Teresa smoked marijuana and drank beer. Alex was high, and as sometimes happened, he suddenly got serious. He wanted to talk about books and ideas, but he knew before he spoke that nobody was interested. They wanted a good time and wouldn’t know what he was talking about; they’d think he was a fool. He felt very lonely as he watched the girls snuggling up to Wedo and JoJo. He vowed that this situation wouldn’t happen again.
The situation had no chance to happen again: JoJo was arrested the next day. He went to a malt shop across from the high school to wait for the girl he’d taken to the concert. The malt shop was nearly empty, which was usual until classes were over. Two juvenile detectives from the local precinct came to see the owner about a recent burglary at the dry cleaner’s next door. There sat JoJo on a stool. Both detectives knew him well enough to call his nickname; both also knew he was an escapee.
“JoJo Altabella, as I live and breathe!” one of them exclaimed cheerily.
When Teresa came in after school, the malt shop owner told her what had happened. She immediately called home and warned Alex. He was out the back door and gone through the rear alley five minutes before the detectives came looking for him. He and Wedo spent that night in a flophouse hotel on Sixteenth and Main streets. It was the first time Alex had rented a hotel room, and he really expected the clerk to refuse a th
irteen-year-old, or at least to have questions. But when he eyed them, Wedo gave him an extra two dollars, and his suspicion became a wink.
Alex became enamored with roaming the city streets. Within a few days his uncertainty was washed away by the constant challenge and excitement. Each day opened with the possibility of new adventures. Wedo was seventeen and, notwithstanding his illiteracy, extremely street-smart. He’d grown up virtually without supervision, fending for himself in tough neighborhoods. He had no cognizance of abstract values, or analysis, or of anything else except how to function on the mean streets. Because of his age and experience he was the leader, but without his realizing it, Alex was the more violent of the pair. Wedo talked about violence constantly, and Alex took the word for the reality; he didn’t know that Wedo’s constant talk was unconscious compensation for the Catholic religion he overtly rejected but which his mother had deeply instilled in him while he was still a toddler.
Alex and Wedo committed a variety of crimes, averaging nearly a felony a day—not counting smoking marijuana—if anyone wanted to make a tally. They jackrolled homosexuals the way Wedo had described, enticing them from public restrooms to some dark alley and jumping them. The scores were meager, never more than thirty dollars, so after four such robberies they quit that and devised a way to steal the coin box on streetcars, at least those streetcars with a single motorman-conductor. The youths would get on separately a stop apart. One stayed near the front; the other went to the rear. The one in the rear would reach out and disengage the rod connecting to the overhead electric wires. The streetcar lost power and stopped. The conductor would go to the rear to deal with the problem. The boy in front snatched the coin box, leaped out the front and ran. They did this three times and were smart enough to stop, assuming that pretty soon someone would be waiting for them if they kept it up. Actually, they needed relatively little money. It was plenty if they had ten dollars apiece, a few joints, and a bottle of wine—especially if they were cruising in Hank’s car, looking tough. When that car was unavailable they hotwired one and joyrided around, never keeping it more than eight hours, for Wedo knew that license numbers didn’t go on the “hot sheet” until the shifts changed. In six weeks they stole eight automobiles.
Their adventures were not always pleasurable. One night Wedo bought the ticket for an all-night movie on Main Street while Alex waited in the alley to be let in through an emergency exit. The exit was in the lobby of the men’s restroom. Alex heard noises inside, became impatient, and knocked. The door opened, but instead of Wedo it was a uniformed policeman with a raised nightstick. Alex whirled and ran as the club crashed on his right shoulder near his neck, a pain so great that he scarcely felt the hard kick to the tip of his spine. He sprawled on his hands and knees and could have been caught if the policeman hadn’t been satisfied. The next day Alex could hardly move his arm, and the entire shoulder area was purple. It was months before he could lift his arm straight over his head without pain. Everything in his life showed him the primacy of violence.
In this postwar time, only the first waves of the human sea had come to Los Angeles, and the San Fernando Valley was just a few communities surrounded by citrus groves and alfalfa. But the city was already an immense sprawl. Its poorer citizens already inhabited the older and seamier central and east side areas. Circumstances pretty much kept Alex in these poorer environs. He didn’t truly appreciate the different worlds as divided by money. If anything, he found the poor quarters to be where he was less affected and more willing to accept things—or maybe it was because Wedo knew people who thought nothing amiss in a pair of youths running loose, and those were the people Alex met. Every day was an adventure, and Alex enjoyed just seeing things. One evening at dusk they abandoned a stolen car near Alameda Street, in the middle of a vast scrap yard. Everything was old, impregnated with grime and rust, all the colors dull and gray, a world of monochrome. Alex followed Wedo over a board fence. It was a shortcut to Wedo’s neighborhood to cross this immense yard of scrap metal. The hush of dusk was upon the place. Alex was awed and fascinated by the mountainous piles of castoff automobiles; they loomed to create a skyline. He got the same feeling in the railroad yards, seeing one hundred pairs of tracks filled for miles by dusty boxcars. It was a sense of something for which words were inadequate. It was akin to the awe most persons feel at the grandeur of nature. It was not the same feeling but a maimed cousin thereto.
A night finally came where Wedo had to go home and they had no money for the cheap hotel room. The hour was past midnight. Earlier it had rained, and there was the kind of wind that usually precedes more.
“No jive,” Wedo said. “I got the runny shits and I’m weak.” Though the night was cool, beads of sweat were on his forehead.
“You don’t look good,” Alex said.
“If Hank had been there, he coulda drove you to San Pedro. Teresa said it was cool.”
“What about a streetcar?”
“They stopped running at midnight.”
“Don’t worry about me, man. I’ll be okay.”
“It might start raining. You gotta get in somewhere. If the fuzz sees you—bam! You’re dusted.”
“Maybe I should find some fruiter to take me home,” Alex said, half joking.
A wrinkled mask of disgust was Wedo’s response.
“I know,” Alex said. “Besides, we got ’em terrorized. The word’s gone around. I can see some of ’em lookin’ at us funny. They heard a description, I’ll bet.”
“You don’t wanna do that anyway.”
“It’s better than pneumonia … or getting busted. Anything is better than that. I just wanna get in somewhere.”
Wedo snapped his fingers, “I know a spot … close to my pad, too. C’mon.”
They left fifteen cents for the two coffees and started walking. The place Wedo knew of was the basement of an apartment building. “There’s some old couches and shit stashed down there. You can make it one night.”
The building was two stories high and spread along half a block. It was two blocks from Wedo’s home. It was a building for the poor, as was everything in this neighborhood.
“Around back,” Wedo said.
They turned into the total darkness of an alley. Behind the apartment house was an unpaved parking lot. It was very dark, totally black against the building, though someone there could see movement and some shape looking out. They kept silent, Wedo leading him by touch.
The building jutted out in wings, creating a “U” shape. The basement door was at the base of the “U.” As they reached it, the loudest sound they heard was their breathing. In the stillness they could clearly hear passing cars half a block away. Wedo tugged Alex close and whispered, his mouth an inch from Alex’s ear. “Light a match. It’s loose on the frame and a catch lock. It’ll take one second.”
Alex leaned close, shielding the glow. Wedo had his pocket knife ready. The moment the match flashed so he could see exactly where the catch was, he jabbed in the knife point, pried, and tugged. Indeed, it was faster than turning a key.
The door squeaked and Wedo hissed between his teeth. Now they were in absolute darkness. Alex lighted several matches before they went down the creaky stairs. More matches showed a room fifteen-feet square.
“Nothing here but cobwebs,” Alex said softly.
“Oh, man, I was down here three months ago and they had it over there.”
A padlocked door was at one end; breaking through it was out of the question.
“Let’s split,” Alex said. “Fuck this place.”
“We’ll think of something.”
On thieves’ feet they ascended the wooden stairs, Wedo in front.
They pushed the door partially open. Ten feet ahead to the left was a wooden stoop outside a screen door. The screen door squeaked. It sounded to them like a scream. A bulky figure started out, his white undershirt a lighter shadow. Wedo bolted instantly and wordlessly. He had to run in front of the man to get out of the “U.” Alex was stil
l hidden and unseen in the doorway’s blackness.
The figure stepped on the porch. His hand came up as Wedo went by. “Freeze, goddammit!” he bellowed.
Alex spurted out, lunged three steps, and hit the revolver before the man could shoot.
“Run, Alex!” Wedo yelled, his voice already distant.
It was useless, for a grip too strong held him, and there was the terrifying sound of a revolver cocking next to his head.
“Don’t move or you’re dead,” the man said.
A moment later his wife was in the screen door with a flashlight.
“I called ’em,” she said. “You got one … my god, he’s just a kid.”
“He’s a punk.”
“Your mother’s a punk,” Alex snarled, tears of frustration and pain forming. It almost felt good when the man backhanded him. The strong blow made him think of physical pain, not the worse kind that had been rising.
* * *
Twenty minutes later he was handcuffed in the back seat of a prowl car, fighting back tears as he stared out at the city—the lights, the night, the people, freedom—all gone again. The only sound was the chronic crackle of the radio and the monotoned voices calling out. “Eight twelve to fourteen twelve East Beverly. See the man and keep the peace…” Police radio calls would always thereafter wrench his stomach.
He could tell by the sights that he was being taken to Georgia Street. They would try to get him to “clean the books” on burglaries in the area. He would say nothing—and even if he did, they could do nothing. He was already in the worst place they could send him. They would call Whittier. Tomorrow he would be picked up and taken back.
18
Alex expected someone from Whittier to pick him up the day after his arrest, but it took four days, and the men who signed him out were from the Los Angeles office. Sacramento had ordered him transferred to the Preston School of Industry, the reformatory for older, tougher youths. Its age bracket was fifteen to seventeen. Alex was thirteen, and his stomach felt hollow when they told him the destination. Nobody in Whittier had ever been in Preston, but there were legends of how tough it was.
Little Boy Blue Page 29
