Children of the Streets

by Harlan Ellison

  He got up and walked over to this crate next to the judge’s bench. He sat down, grinning like an ape at me.

  ‘You see the defendant, Softy Emerson, talkin’ to the ex-principal, Greenberg, on the day of the big rumble?’

  ‘Yes, yer Honor, I sure as hell did!’

  They all laughed at that too, ’cause he was makin’ screwy faces, and swearin’—and they liked that. Shark gave him a playful punch on the arm and said, ‘Come on, you dumb slob, stop goofin’! This is serious.’ But he was laughing too.

  ‘I seen the defendant, Softy, talkin’ with Greenberg in his office. The rest of the guys had been shoved out by the cops, and I was in the hall. I was listenin’ at the door behind the principal’s office—the one they use sometimes to let special guests out without havin’ to go through the front offices.’

  ‘And what’d he say?’ Shark asked.

  ‘He told the old man he was gonna put the finger on us, and he named the four guys what’re in the can. He said he was gonna wreck the Organization.’

  Shark smiled and ran a hand back along his slicked-down hair. He laughed and slammed the hammer-gaval on the top of the crate. It went right through, and he turned to the kids all lined up in a row.

  ‘Well, you heard enough evidence? You heard enough or you wanna hear more? We got a lotta Organization members here who could make charges against the defendant, Softy Emerson, but they don’t need to. Heard enough?’

  Most of them didn’t say it so loud, but all of them said, ‘We heard enough.’ So Shark gave the move to Snapjack.

  ‘Go, Snapper! Now beat his butt!’

  Snapjack got off that crate so fast the thing fell over. He had the cat up, and my head was turned so I saw him whip it at me. The thing honest-to-God sizzled, and then the pain shot down through my back in a million tiny arrows, and numbed my legs. I couldn’t help it—I screamed.

  The bastard just laughed then, and went at it, whacking the hell out of me.

  I was lucky. I fainted along about the thirtieth stroke.

  I came to, still hanging there. One of the guys was arguing with Snapjack, and another with Shark.

  ‘Listen,’ the kid was saying, ‘we’ve had enough of this! We joined the Organization ’cause you said there’d be some easy dough in it, and we’d get to have some fun, but this ain’t money or fun. Softy’s gotta play this Friday. How the hell’s he gonna shoot any fouls with his back like that?’

  There were answering murmurs from the others.

  I knew this was my chance to get the hell outta here, and maybe even clean out the Organization for good, once and for all. But it wasn’t going to be easy.

  I let out a howl. ‘Oh my God! The pain! Jeezus, get me down!’

  I heard some of them moving to get me off those rings, but Porky stepped out in front of them, the .38 clutched in his fleshy mitt. He pointed it at them and said, ‘Back! Back you lousy yellow-livers! We’re gonna finish this big basketball star right now. He’s been a pain in the ass too long already!’

  He turned around to me, and raised the gun. I had to do something—the other kids were all stopped cold.

  The pain was so bad I thought I’d die, but I hunched my shoulders and swung back hard with both my feet. I felt one foot crack him in the nose and the other bounce off his forehead. He went ‘Yow!’ and fell back. I twisted my head and saw him go flailin’ back into the other kids.

  They were on him in a second, and over him.

  Shark and Snapjack and Fleep tried to stop them, but they were goin’ too fast, and there were too many of them.

  Three kids got to me and had my wrists out of the rings.

  They dropped me and the pains hit me all at once. Bang, bang, bang, real big and hurtin’ like all hell. I felt blood runnin’ down into the top of my pants. I was gonna even it up with that Snapjack for all this.

  Then all of a sudden a shot went splintering up through the roof of the cellar. And Porky came out from under the bunch of guys that was tryin’ to get the gun away from him.

  He came up, with his little piggy eyes all white-hot and drool comin’ outta his fat lips, and he started screamin’, ‘I hadda be little, I hadda be little! So you could all be bigger’n me! But now I’m bigger, and I’ll show ya! I’ll show you smart bastards who’s big or not!’

  Then he fired point-blank into a kid’s face. I knew that kid. He’d been buffaloed into joining the Organization. His name was Carpenter. It was the end of the Organization when Carpenter got his. There wasn’t a kid there would stay with those crazy slobs.

  The shot took off the whole left side of his face. It spun him around sidewise, spattering the wall with his kisser, and he fell across the judge’s orange crate. He wasn’t quite dead, somehow, and we heard the bubbling from him. It made me wanna puke, and one kid did that.

  Then Porky looked around like he was gonna fire again, and I picked up an orange crate, quietly, and heaved it at him. It bounced off his head, and sent him staggering back against the steps of the cellar.

  He turned real iggy white and ran up the stairs. One of the kids started after him, and got three steps up. Then Porky fired. The kid took it in the bicep, and tumbled back down. We yanked him out of the line of fire just in time.

  The next shot richocheted off the cement floor right where he’d been lying.

  We were trapped. Trapped in the basement of that old icehouse, with Shark and Snapjack and Fleep, and a bunch of kids who were still maybe a little bit in the Organization. Some of them were after my skull.

  And Porky—half nuts—on the stairs. The only way out, and a cuckaboo had it blocked off.

  Another shot rattled down the stairwell and shattered against the concrete wall. Shark and Snapjack were edging toward a dark corner of the basement. I saw them, and knew they were up to something—but I didn’t know what.

  I wasn’t sure where I stood with those other guys. There were at least fifteen or sixteen of them, and they could have put me down real quick if they’d wanted to.

  I had to take a chance. ‘Hey!’ I yelled. ‘Grab ’em! They got something going back there!’

  Three guys jumped Shark and Snapjack just as the two made a break toward the dark corner. Back in the wall was a door. They yanked it open and tried to run through it.

  They were swamped with coal.

  Coal, big and black and heavy, came cascading out, showering down on them in a river of black.

  They stumbled back, right into the three kids, who grabbed them and pulled them back to the center of the basement.

  ‘There must be a way out up there,’ I said. I started for the coalbin.

  Shark’s mean voice stopped me halfway there. ‘Porky’ll cool you good, Emerson. He’s nuts! We talked him into hatin’ you so bad he won’t quit till he’s stuck a shank in your belly or a bullet in your face! Gone, that’s what he is! Gone! Real gone! Go on up and see. You’ll see!’

  One of the kids slapped him across the mouth and he shut up, glarin’ at me real mean. “I’ll be back,’ I told them.

  I walked into the coalbin, over the slide that had fallen out when Shark had opened the door. I could see a small square outline of light against the black of the coalbin.

  My back really hurt.

  Snapjack hadn’t spared the horses with that whip, and the fire was really slicin’ me down the middle. I climbed up on the coal. It was a neat triangular pile, like a pyramid. I couldn’t figure why it had been dumped in that old icehouse. Maybe someone was still using the joint for something.

  I climbed to the top, slipping and sliding in that crap, with the dust rising in my face and making me cough. The window was just a swinging thing, and I shoved it out. It locked in place, and I pulled myself out.

  I was on the street, and it had gotten to be night. I slipped close to the building and came around the front. I saw the side door to the icehouse, where Porky was holed up in the tiny hall, and edged over to it. There was a little window in the door and I looked down through it.
Porky was hunkered up against the wall, his little piggy eyes keeping close watch on the stairs leading down to the basement.

  I damned myself for not having the kids set up a squalling to distract him. There was only one way to take him, and that was sudden. If I could slam the door open fast, it would pin him against the wall—between wall and door. I was prayin’ he didn’t get that .38 up in time.

  I turned the knob slowly, holdin’ it real tight so it wouldn’t squeak, and then threw my weight against the door.

  It banged open and caught him in the chest. The gun went off, right through the door, and splintered off wood an inch from my ear. I was around the door, and I planted my knee as hard as I could in Porky’s face. He was sinkin’ sideways, on to the stairs that led up into the icehouse itself, and I didn’t bother usin’ my hands. I brought my foot back and caught him right in the throat with it.

  He screamed high and pitched over on to my foot, still clutchin’ the .38, still tryin’ to shoot me.

  Then he went slack and fainted cold.

  ‘Poor bastard,’ I said. ‘They can call you piggy and fat and ugly just once too often, can’t they? I guess it gets to all of us, Porky.’

  He looked pretty goddam pathetic layin’ there.

  I took the gun from his fingers. It was a hard job.

  They took Shark and Snapjack and Porky and Fleep and a couple others to the detention home. They were set for trial in a few months, and it looked like it was going to be bad—real bad.

  Bad for everybody. Even J. A. got written up in all the papers. It was a pretty rotten mess.

  The first day we were back in school, a few of us got together to draw up a new student council policy so nothing like the Organization could get started again. Then we presented it to the new principal, Shisgall.

  He was a stony sonofabitch, but after we’d kicked it around a bit—and because we’d helped the cops clear the mess up—he had to let it go through.

  So we got our clean school government, and nothing like the Organization will ever happen here again. We hope.

  Even the new principal tried to be a big man and get ‘in with the boys.’ He told us we were gonna have our student government, and even nominated me for president.

  ‘Well, we got things straightened away nicely in John Adams’, Emerson,’ he said to me one afternoon when I was leaving the building. ‘Things are good as new, don’t you think?’

  I looked at him. He wasn’t gonna last long around here.

  I looked at him, and I thought of Flip Shapiro, and little Petey Sellers and Carpenter, and that poor slob Porky in a home for the rest of his life. I even thought of Shark and Snapjack and the rest. They’d either get fried or look out between bars till they died.

  ‘It’ll never be good as new, Mr Shisgall,’ I said.

  When I left the building, he was still looking after me. He didn’t dig it one bit.

  I don’t think he ever will.

  Memory of A Muted Trumpet presents a different view of the children of the gutters. Here are the Bohemians having their kicks, the tots with too many vices recruiting one another for the scum battalions. This may be colorful, exotic and beatnik Greenwich Village to you, but to those of us who have lived and marveled in the Village, this is the degraded, dead-end, no-exit way taken by two kinds of people: the empty ones and the tourists.

  MEMORY OF A MUTED TRUMPET

  They called the place Valhalla, but it was a loft on Second Street, a wino’s-breath from the Bowery, a pub’s-crawl from the Village.

  It was on the fourth floor of a condemned building, and no one else lived there. Just the Green Hornet and Spoof and Gig-Man. There was Gig-Man’s new woman—they called her PattyPeek because her name was Patty and she looked like she was always peeking around a corner like that—and half a dozen cats, three of whom were named Shadrach, Meshach and Boo-dow!

  The night the girl they later called Irish first showed at Valhalla, they were having a rent party. The Hungarian who owned the rattrap still made it to their door the first of every month, holding the rope they had nailed up for a banister, and demanding his pound of flesh. So they were having a rent party, and digging.

  The Green Hornet was hunkered down in front of the stereo digging Shelly Manne whacking it home on Man With The Golden Arm at 180 decibels. The Salamander was sitting in the butterfly chair, combing her hair and trying to rationalize Nietzsche with her harelip. William Arthur Henderson-Kalish was standing in a corner talking to Number One and his latest acquisition, a chick named Maureen who had carrot-colored hair. He was telling them, ‘Mencken was a genius, okay. But he had too many blind spots; the Jews, organized religion, isolationism. Genius is no excuse for being so out of it…’

  Big Walt was sitting like a monarch in the easy chair near the forest of rubber plants. All 314 pounds of him, perspiring freely, making that area verboten for anyone with a nose, and drinking from a can of beer on top of a stack of thirty beers. There was an old man nobody knew—he had a mouthful of gold teeth so he’d been nicknamed Goldmouth—and he was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor, speaking softly in a Vermont dialect about, ‘Goin’ tuh the barn dance in m’dungies…’

  In the kitchen, six nobodys in button-down shirts and Harris tweed jackets were pouring the contents of a hip flask into the gigantic cooking pot of sweet lucy. They had each paid their dollar-fifty for the privilege of attending the party, and they were making certain—through dint of sheer alcohol—that they would each wind up with a weirdie Bohemian chick in their bed that night. Everyone was pointedly ignoring them.

  A knock on the door was ignored by everyone except Floormat, a short and exceedingly dumpy girl with adolescent pimples, who hurried to answer it. When she flung open the door, Dick Eherenson and his new wife Portia stood there, holding their baby. They had been married a week; and the baby was almost a year old. Its name was Bach Partita.

  In the bedroom, where a monstrous bed took up the entire floor space—room enough for three couples in it—God Cellar was sitting cross-legged upon the dirty sheets, informing a rapt audience of four girls from Hunter College what the drug peyote was like.

  ‘It’s non-habit forming and it’s purely safe. The one drawback is that it tastes like hell. I mean, it’s so bad the thought of it can make you puke.’

  ‘What’s it made from?’ one of the girls, a freshman with deep-black eyes, asked.

  God Geller ran a shaky hand through his short curly hair. ‘The peyote cactus,’ he answered conversationally. ‘We have it mailed to us from a nursery in Texas. It’s illegal in California, you know. I used to blast off on it when I was in Hollywood. You know I was in one of the Bowery Boys movies, don’t you?’

  God Geller had once hitchhiked as far West as the Napa Valley, where he had worked for two months hauling feed bags on a dude ranch. He had come back to astound his friends in New York with tales of his sexual prowess among the starlets, and his modicum of success in the cinema. He was a paranoid.

  ‘…the Indians have a religion based on the peyote. First you strip off the spines and the bark around the roots, and you cut them up and boil them down into a tea. The stuff is too bitter otherwise.’

  ‘Is it really that bad?’ asked one of the girls, her young face lit with awe.

  God Geller made a steeple with his fingers, and pointed the edifice at her. ‘I can’t tell you how bad it is. When you drink it, you have to cut it with Hawaiian punch or tomato juice, and toss it off real quick, otherwise you’ll barl, right then. Your stomach can’t hold it down for very long, maybe a half-hour.

  ‘I’ve been able to keep it down over an hour before I vomited it back up!’ he claimed proudly. ‘But that’s enough time for the stuff to saturate the lining of your stomach, and then boo-dow, it’s like you were a God or something!’

  A chemistry major, a girl with freckles and a large nose supporting horn-rimmed glasses, interrupted his panegyric. ‘What does the peyote cactus look like?’

  God Gell
er looked at her with annoyance. This was the only one he considered a dog. He had been trying to impress the others. He answered her sharply, ‘The biggest is about the size of a fist, the smallest like a walnut. The thing looks like a mushroom head without a stalk; it’s a root like a sweet potato.’

  He turned back to the goodlookers who hung on his every word, dropping his hand to the knee of one sophomore with large breasts.

  ‘It like heightens your senses,’ he confided. ‘You see everything clearer, hear everything better. You just naturally dig more. The neons in the street look like little jewels—everything is better. It’s just a great kick, if you can stomach the taste.’

  ‘That bad, huh?’ asked the sophomore, moving his hand under her skirt slightly.

  ‘Yeah, it’ll make you puke every time. After a while you build up a tolerance though. It’s worth it when you’ve been up on it for a few days. Great!’

  He stood up and moved out of the room with her, into the darkened hallway. He had never sampled peyote; he had read Huxley on the subject. But the sophomore had large breasts. It was an opener.

  The chem major was jotting notes in a pocket notebook.

  The party was swinging, everybody was digging. Everybody but Spoof.

  Spoof was feeling down. The party was a flake.

  There was another bang on the door, and Spoof rolled over on his stomach. He was lying on a Mexican shawl stretched out near the dead fireplace. Not more of these dead-beat creeps, he thought. What we have to put up with just to pay off the goddam rent.

  Floormat opened the door, and Roger ‘Teddy Bear’ Sims stood there with a girl on his arm. One of the button-down boobs let out a low, long two-note whistle, and Spoof rolled over quickly. She was fantastic.

  It wasn’t anything simple about her; it was more the overall effect. The moment she walked in ahead of Teddy Bear, her feet in their high heels carefully placed on the tilting floorboards, she was Irish to him. Whatever her name might be, she was simply Irish.