Children of the Streets

by Harlan Ellison

  The Barons were smart enough not to start heists in their own territory. It can only last so long before the shopkeepers and merchants recognize that they have a crime wave on their hands, and begin to spot the kids on the streets.

  So the Barons rode the IRT, the BMT, the Independent Subway, calmly, coolly, looking like youngsters out for an evening of fun, and made their heists in other gangs’ turfs.

  I rode with them. I didn’t like it, but I rode with them. It would have been punking out to have refused. To punk out is to commit suicide. I like living.

  The neighborhood we chose was—well, I won’t tell you where it was, it’s safer that way, if you don’t mind, but it was in lower Manhattan, and it closed up early.

  A typical gang job is a calculated thing, professional in timing and execution. Three men handle a store. A roll of adhesive tape is brought in to play, taping a circle on the plate glass of a door. The glass-cutter; a quick flat-hand smash while hanging on to the taped section; reach around to open the door and inside fast.

  Grocery stores yield cash registers, cigarettes, beer, and Heart Fund contribution boxes.

  But we weren’t after grocery stores this time.

  It was a sport shop into which we broke. The alarm rang, it rang like hell, but there are few things quicker than kids who have been raised on stickball, basketball and climbing over rooftops. We had the stuff we wanted and were out in the clear before a cop could show.

  Those raids that week netted the Barons five revolvers, a dozen assorted rifles, plenty of ammunition—most of it the wrong caliber for the guns stolen—and a Very pistol.

  The time was growing short before the rumble. And in the restless, caged-animal attitude of the young hood, the Barons went looking for trouble to whet their appetities.

  They found it.

  They found it in the form of a lone boy playing basketball in his schoolyard. A Negro boy.

  Few gangs are interracial; it would appear the bigot and the narrow-minded are predominant in kid groups. Since they also hate Puerto Ricans, Jews, Russians, anyone who differs from the accepted religious and racial norm for their area, they tied the boy in the schoolyard and worked him over.

  I wasn’t there, thank God, but when I heard the story, related with much laughter, my blood turned to water in my veins.

  I’m a Jew.

  If they ever found that out, or if they even suspected I was in their midst to write about them, my life would be good for something like ten seconds after they got wise. Frightened? You bet your sweet life I was. And still am.

  No one knows how many jumped that kid, but he was paralyzed on the left side of his face, his skull was fractured, his hand was broken and his body was a mass of welts from pelvis to chest. He was taken to a hospital, and two of the marauders were thrown in jail.

  But that didn’t help the boy.

  He was out in three months, but his face still sags a little where it was paralyzed.

  Few of the Barons were idle. Most of them held down steady jobs. They relied on their facility as burglars and lush-muggers to augment their incomes, of course, because the bulk of their paychecks went to the heads of their homes. But the howling money came from the sweat of their own little brows, in the streets and on the rooftops.

  But during those long, electricity-filled days, the Barons stayed out of school and away from their jobs. There was no sense letting an anxious Flyer commando group know where you were. They stayed cold away from Flyer turf, and the Flyers made sure not to inch over into Baron country, but still there was no sense taking any chances.

  During those days the young studs sat around the brownstone steps of their neighborhoods, waiting.

  I lived uptown, and I told them so. But I didn’t tell them where uptown. I had no interest in a Baron following me home to check on me. So during those days of wait and wait and watch, I kept going to work, and heading for Brooklyn after five o’clock.

  Entering any of the streets in Flyer or Baron turf, you could feel the pulse of expectancy. Little Polish women with market-bags hurried to the store and back, making sure they kept to well-lighted, crowded streets. Mothers found themselves arguing more and more with their young daughters about going out. Fathers and businessmen looked grim and worried.

  Beer cans fell out of windows more and more frequently.

  Things were tightening up.

  And the kids themselves—what did they look like?

  They changed. They found themselves walking on eggshells and watching for groups of other teenagers. They found themselves hugging their knives and polishing their pieces. They grew tight-lipped and squint-eyed.

  Like men about to go into battle.

  There’s no model for a kid gangster. Each is a product of a different environment: middle-class home, slum tenement; church-going family, atheist background; intelligent, illiterate, feeble-minded. The only common denominator is their identification with the gang. It is a home away from home. The gang owns them and they have a very vital stake in the gang.

  Groups range in type by area and age group. The ‘squirts’, or young teen groups—from twelve to fifteen—usually serve as fight instigators, lookouts, information gatherers, breeding grounds for the older groups. The stud groups—anywhere from sixteen to twenty-one—are the boys that make the headlines. From there God only knows into what group they graduate.

  Many leave the gangs when they are mature enough to find a useful purpose in a society that till then has been cold and turned against them.

  Some don’t.

  You read about those boys in the newspapers too.

  Some don’t make it alive to the newspapers. That is a result of the gang rumble, usually.

  The rumble is psychologically satisfying to the immature mind of the young tough in many ways. It provides him with an adventurous escapade that will liven up an otherwise humdrum existence. It is packed with all the danger and romance that the motion pictures and comic books have come to associate with war and killing. It allows him to show his stuff.

  Then, too, there’s the good healthy feeling of kicking a guy’s teeth in.

  The Prospect Park rumble between the Barons and the Flyers was only days away, and the Barons’ president called a special meeting.

  Every kid in the club, the nucleus of twenty-six hardened ‘rocks’ and the sixty-odd from surrounding neighborhoods, met in the cellar clubroom.

  I was there too, in the back, and quiet.

  The debs had been called in also, and the prez had a tough time keeping the boys’ minds on business.

  The chicks of gang kids are in many ways even more ruthless. Their affairs with club members are violent, often deadly, and produce almost exactly the same effects in every case.

  When debs fight it is a knock-down-blot-up of the first order. They have learned well from their male counterparts.

  Knees, teeth, nails, and hair-pulling carried to a frightening extent are employed. A girl jumped by more than one deb can expect to have her pert features racked out of shape. Many young girls join the debs for kicks, and they get them—literally.

  The current fad among kid gangs and their deb auxiliaries is the pretty indication of ownership and fidelity shown by carving the current boyfriend’s initials either on the girl’s back, arms, or breasts.

  This makes for difficulty when the girl switches boyfriends.

  The council of war in the cellar followed the usual lines taken by club meetings. The resemblances to a college fraternity meet are striking.

  The executive council—prez, vice-prez, war councilor and aide, treasurer, social chairman and secretary—told the assembled membership what had transpired and under what terms the war was to be fought.

  The place was reeking with cigarette smoke, and off in corners there were stubborn members who found it more interesting to examine the anatomy of their current Rockette than to dig the meeting.

  Until the war councilor started outlining the terms. Then every stud sat up, squashed
his butt, ignored his broad, and the eyes changed slightly, cat-like, narrowing, glistening. They liked the terms: all out. No holds barred. Anything goes. Stomp or be stomped.

  The gang liked the terms real much. It meant the guns could be used. They would have been used in any case, but this made it legal. There were enough pieces to heel a good many of the members.

  The prez told us all to go home and stay off the streets till the next night—some of the Flyers might get happy and jump the gun. He also told us to stay off the sneaky pete and H till the showdown. He didn’t want any good men out with the jags.

  I almost burst into laughter at the sounds of commander-in-chief-briefing-his-men that he made.

  Then I thought of where his men were going, and what they were going to be doing, and I wanted to burst into tears. If I’d been a million evangelists I might have stood up and tried to get them to stop their organized madness, but I was just one twenty-one-year-old writer masquerading as an eighteen-year-old street hood. I couldn’t have stopped them; no one could.

  They were bound for hell, and they were chomping at the bit.

  We broke up and, as the prez had suspected, some of the studs wanted some pot. They asked me if I wanted to head up to one member’s pad; he had some junk and we’d get high and cool. I told them I’d come along, but that I was off the stuff. They said okay, I could tag along.

  When we hit the place, the smell was like an opium den and everything looked green and fuzzy around the edges. About fifteen members had already arrived, and the six studs I’d come with headed fast for the lad with the sticks.

  They each shelled out and took their reefers into corners to get plastered.

  The incidence of narcotics addiction in teenage gangs is high. Some teen gangs, that is. There are those who know that some men fight better with a little M in them, but for the most part it’s not a good thing to let the boys get too high.

  Besides, they’d have to get the stuff from a pusher, and that’s usually cut into the club treasury, which was used primarily to sponser dances.

  Pot, or low-grade marijuana, often grown in window-boxes and home-rolled, is an old stand-by of the teen gangster.

  It’s his courage when he has none, his aphrodisiac when he needs one, his entertainment when he can afford none.

  The higher-grade stuff, heroin and the like, must be purchased from a contact, but once you have it, it’s a pop and a cinch! A spoon, a needle, a good cigarette lighter to heat it, and you’re all set: mainline it!

  And that set the prez hadn’t wanted them to be. Sometimes his boys got so well set it took two days to get them down off cloud thirteen.

  I looked around. There weren’t any girls in sight, but the sneaky pete was out. They had it laid up in pint bottles. The stuff reeked like boiling urine. Sneaky pete was usually homebrewed (often strained through a loaf of bread to distill it) and calculated to either make you go blind or get your guts to running counterclockwise if you liked it too much.

  This was to be the big rumble, and the prez had been smart in warning the boys off the pot and pete. He didn’t want anyone geeked up in a doorway from too much junk.

  I took a glass of ginger ale from the icebox and hunkered down by the door of the apartment. It was a four-flight walk-up and I gathered the parents of the boy who had thrown the pot-blast were to be away all night.

  About one o’clock I was bored and half-asleep, and about ready to cut out, when the door banged open by my head and the executive council came storming in.

  The prez had gotten wind of the pot-blast and he was sore. He looked for one of the boys—the one who had started the blast. I was too new in the club to know how the prez was sure which boy it had been, but he went straight to one called Fish, and hit him full in the face.

  The boy had been pouring water from a pitcher, and the thing flew across the room and smashed on the wall, spraying several smokers on the couch.

  We all stood back and watched as the prez methodically beat the living hell out of Fish.

  ‘Now hit for home before the rest of you get it,’ he said, and we leeched out fast.

  Next evening, as though an invisible chime had struck the hour in everyone’s head, the membership, including Squirt groups, debs and allies, met in the clubroom. The prez made a few remarks about the Puertos and what we would do to them, and then the guns were passed out.

  I was a new member, so I didn’t get one. But I still had a vicious pair of brass knucks constructed from little metal cubes mounted on a steel bar, and a deadly bayonet. I have seen those knucks, wielded by another Baron, smash a boy’s jaw in five places, breaking it raggedly. They are not a pretty tool of destruction.

  The bayonet is a formidable thing, originally used by the Rangers in World War II, and so constructed that you can either slide it into someone’s ribs or crush his head with the handle.

  And I had the least vicious weapons there.

  Mothers who vaguely were aware that their sons might have to go to war someday would have blanched white to see the hungry eyes and ready hands that groped toward those guns. The killer was at the surface now. No one spoke—they snarled. The picturesque language of the gutter-kid was gone; only the obscenities were left.

  The social workers and gang supervisors had gotten word of the rumble, of course. No one could miss the signs. The neighborhoods were alive with tension; no one was out on the streets. Cars somehow found ways of detouring away from those sections.

  But they couldn’t stop it. The police knew a war was about to break, but they didn’t know where, and the social workers were up against a brick wall.

  It was better that they didn’t try to break it up anyhow. A lot of cops and social workers would have gotten killed.

  Let them fling themselves at one another, these modern-day products of our culture. Let them smash and crush and blast and rip each other till the blood runs high in the gutters, for no one can come before them and hope to stop them.

  Their fighting is inevitable, and if they don’t do it under terms of war, where many will survive, they will do it with knives in the back and with home-made bombs in the cars, and many more will die.

  Perhaps the sight of all that blood will stop them one day.

  But their advance was inexorable. That close to a rumble, only an act of God could have prevented the thing from happening.

  And God doesn’t seem to be interested in the poor slobs.

  Prospect Park at the appointed hour was teeming with gang kids. We had come on foot, following a devious path, and the three strokes of the church bell marked our passage.

  I was scared. I had gotten into this thing to write about it, not to get killed in the middle of it. I was no hero, and all I wanted was to cast light on the inside. Now it appeared that light would be cast on my insides.

  We kept together, and I realized the soundness of the gang psychology: might is right, superiority in numbers. How could a kid hope to grow up in the streets without learning the inherent truth of that credo?

  We came out from behind a line of parked cars and began crossing the street.

  The Puerto Rican Flyers were ready.

  The first shots exploded off to my right and I heard some high, adolescent voice scream in agony. It had started.

  The pitch-black of the park was suddenly firefly alive with gun-bursts and sparklers of flame. Most of the shots were going wild, but occasionally I could hear a thrashing and a cough. Blood seemed to be drenching me, not sweat.

  Apartment windows flew up at the first few shots. Cries and screams of rage floated through the trees. Someone was howling for the cops.

  Someone else was lying under a tree, clutching his chest with bloodied fingers and murmuring Hail Marys.

  I was sick to my stomach. I was sorry I’d ever wanted to find out how street gangs operated. I was finding out, and I might not live to write about it.

  It was no holds barred, and they liked that. I hung back a little and watched the kids go streaming and
screaming past me, right into the face of that horror.

  The first boy through the trees was caught in the eye by a long pole with a piece of glass on the end. His screams brought the rest running. I suddenly felt the adrenaline go squirting through me. I wanted to run with the pack!

  I wanted to kill too!

  Then I heard the zips come into play. Many a Baron and Flyer thanked a seldom-known God that zips had no accuracy. Even so, the mortality rate was high.

  Before I knew what I was doing, I was running among them. A black shape heaved up out of a bush as I passed and I felt a blast of pain that numbed my right arm completely. I swung, and smashed my brass-knucked fist into the face of the boy who held a heavy club. I felt his head snap around under the blow and he crumpled at my feet.

  I grabbed the club from him. It was a sawed-off chair leg of ironwood with a hunk of lead in one end. It was heavy as a brick, and deadlier.

  One of the debs was squawking in a broken wail, and I saw two Flyer debs working her over. One of them had a long Italian stiletto, and she was slicing up that girl with all the cool aplomb of a paid butcher.

  I jumped them, not thinking really, and smashed the hand that held the knife. The girl bellowed and screamed something in Spanish. I hit the other one in the stomach, a long driving smash with the club, and then half the Flyer club was down my shirt.

  The last thing I saw for a long while was the face of that Baron deb, her skin stripped away, the blood running in streams over her cheeks.

  She got her kicks.

  So did I. I didn’t wake up for quite a while.

  When I did, the first thing that hit me was, why aren’t I dead? I was a ball of pain, lying under a bush, with the howling and screaming and swearing still floating over my head, and the blood running down my face, and my arm useless, but I was still alive.

  I could see, though I was crying and my eyes burned, and I watched that rumble from the safety of the ground.