Children of the Streets

by Harlan Ellison

  Spoof leaped up, his image passing rapidly across the now-peeling mirror standing at the side of the fireplace. It was a clever image, full of Machiavellian undertones; his eyes set deep and brown under his thick eyebrows, the planes of his gaunt face catching light and releasing it in a panoply of shadows. He wore a black crew-neck sweater over a white shirt, and a pair of oatmeal-colored corduroy slacks that just lapped at the tops of his soft doeskin boots. He looked clean, and yet there was a Northern desire in his face. The look of the Astrogoth and the Hun was there.

  He was a writer with great talent and no drive. He lazed in the backwaters of New York, mouthing his philosophies and scrawling his sentiments in loose-leaf binders that might or might not ever get compiled into The Novel of Outrage.

  But right now, as he stood abruptly, he was a man, and what had come through the door was Irish; for him, perhaps for others but especially for him, a sex-symbol. This was a Woman, and he had the spoor.

  Teddy Bear had been mobbed by all the unattached men in the place, all clamoring for an introduction to the girl.

  Spoof stood near the fireplace, watching her face bobbing between their heads, waiting for the glance he knew would come, and when it did, she had been staring at him a long moment before he even realized it. ‘Irish,’ he said, loud enough for her to hear, because she was expecting it, but not loud enough for the others to make out.

  She smiled that gamin smile, and they were mating right then. Right then, they were doing it with their eyes.

  Finally he elbowed through them, said a vague excuse to Teddy Bear—who worked for Pillsbury as a clerk and took his meager hedonism on weekends—and rescued the girl from the horde. They went out through the living room, into the hall, where he yanked open the door and they passed through. Floormat, whose love was a rotting rose clutched between her teeth, watched them go with sorrow and a sour stomach.

  Down the hall there was yet another flight of steps. Up it he led her, like a leaf borne unresisting, fatalistically, on a south wind. The trap door to the roof was easily thrown back, and it was only late summer.

  Time of darkness.

  Time of passion.

  When they came down, she was his, and the party had subsided into mixed apathy and drunkenness. God Geller was under the dirty sheets with the sophomore while the chem major continued taking notes. The button-down boobs, each having made his try with the Salamander as a last resort, had noisily exited, damning Bohemians.

  Her name had been Lois Bishop when she had gone up that dismal flight of stairs. Now, with tar stains on the back of her pencil-slim skirt, her name was Irish, for all time.

  The second time, under a bridge in Central Park far uptown, she told him she had been a virgin the first time. He looked at her quizzically, and there was disbelief on his darkly handsome face. She recognized it for what she thought was pity, and soothed him with the information that a water bucket, at the age of twelve, had preceded him. But she had been a virgin.

  The third time, at Valhalla, in the monstrous bed with its stiff, circular-stained sheets, she confided she was a Catholic. It annoyed him; he was a renegade Jew with no religion whatsoever. She toyed with the idea of converting; he ignored her.

  The fourth time was a hurried thing, a demand made on her lunch hour that she paid simply because it was him, and she did hate the office with its eternally clacking typewriters—while this escape route seemed wide open.

  The fifth time she told him about her parents in the Bronx. They lay side-by-side in the three-dollar room in the hotel without a name, and she told him about her parents, and her kid brother, and the distance she had to walk each day to grab a bus to the subway station. She told him of seasons in Kansas City and the hard times and how her father had said New York was a jungle, but there were always bananas if nothing else in a jungle.

  The sixth time she told him she was pregnant.

  He laughed and went to sleep. Mundane worries!

  She had the baby in Riverside Park, late at night, and left it head-down in a paper bag behind the stone wall bordering the sidewalk. For several months, since she had gotten large, she had lived in a cheap room in a residential hotel catering mostly to poor Puerto Ricans new to the city, and impecunious students at Columbia. She had used the name Mrs Morris Walnack.

  She had known a Morris Walnack in Kansas City when she had been a child.

  Spoof had not called in three months, but she sent him a short note telling him what had happened.

  He invited her to a party.

  It was a bring-a-bottle party.

  In the kitchen the Salamander was squeezing blackheads against the little mirror over the sink. PattyPeek was necking in a dim corner with the Green Hornet, who had recently grown a diabolic-looking red beard. Gig-Man had found Confucius, and PattyPeek was a passionate girl. On the Mexican shawl, God Geller was sitting cross-legged (though his two years of active duty in the Army had made his legs muscle-bound and they cramped easily) picking out Old Joe Clark on the three-string banjo.

  A Barnard girl was watching him rapturously.

  Occasionally he winked at her.

  The cats were clustered around a saucer of beer Shorty Jibbets had set out for them, and Boo-dow was twitching just prior to a consuming epileptic-like fit. Shorty sat on top of the old TV in his undershorts, a towel from the Luxor Baths wrapped turban-style around his oddly shaped head, swearing he would fly the set to the Moon.

  William Arthur Henderson-Kalish was pontificating to a trio of Negro musicians who had fallen-in at a stranger’s mention that someone had a few sticks up here. He was saying in loud tones, ‘Miro was a self-plagiarist. Just the same images turned sidewise and stood on their heads. Nothing new. No elan vital in the later stuff. Now, if Kley had ever left his little world of fantasy, he might have burst forth…’

  Number One, having found Maureen wanted sex and not culture, had gone back to the uneasy relationship with Stanley Reskoff, and now they lay together on the great bed, arguing softly about who should put the make on that sweet young boy from Connecticut that Teddy Bear had brought from the Pillsbury office this evening.

  Maureen lay drunkenly across Big Walt’s lap, her mambo dress with its flaring hem pulled up about her ample thighs. Abruptly she yanked herself to a sitting position with one arm around Big Walt’s neck. She screeched into the semi-darkness of the huge living room:

  ‘How many of you girls want to go to a party? A real party!’

  She hung there absently for an instant, and in that instant Gig-Man rose from the shadowy corner, and with vitriol dripping in his voice, shouted, ‘What the hell do you know about real parties?’

  There was such hatred in his voice that for an instant there was a dead, uncomfortable silence.

  Then he followed it up with, ‘What the hell do you know about anything?’

  Maureen started to say something, but Big Walt belched grotesquely at that moment and put a meaty palm in her face, forcing her back across his lap. She lay there, breathing stertorously and feeling pale.

  Gig-Man found another can of beer and settled back into his corner.

  Floormat sat in a stright-backed chair by the big living-room window, the rubber plants shadowing her. She had a pen in her left hand, a pad of drawing paper propped on her lap, and she drew things eating each other. Her face was dirty, and ink stains smudged her sausage fingers.

  For a long time there was the sound of music in the loft, as Charlie Parker issued his ultimatum to the night. Then, when the world had rolled over him like a tank, his sounds were gone, and, like life on Second Street, embalmed in its own inactivity, suffocated by its own inadequacies, pockmarked by its many intemperances and outright sins, all that was left was the memory of a muted trumpet.

  There were many people at the party, and in one corner of the great living room, sitting on the lap of a boy she did not know, was a girl with dark eyes. Her hair had been awkwardly hand-cut, and though it did not dull the attractiveness of her features,
it made her look strange, Bohemian, unclean and unkempt.

  The boy had his hand on her thigh, and she was whispering to him of Kafka and dull moonlight, and of what roaches think and how to escape the dullness of a regimented life.

  The boy was not listening, but it did not matter. He knew what he wanted from this girl, and there was no doubt in either of their minds that he would get it, if he bothered to tell her he loved her.

  The girl had a name once.

  Now she was Irish, for all time.

  Some diseases are more easily communicable than others, and the recruiting gets done come hell or high water.

  It was a good party. There were lots of new faces.

  Stand Still and Die! shows just how relentless the kids can be. There is much truth here, if you feel like sifting the fiction from the fact. Large chunks of this yarn are gospel. Happy hunting.

  STAND STILL AND DIE!

  It wasn’t pretty, the way they were beating him to death. They were using bricks.

  I’ve been driving a hack in New York ever since I picked up a hunk of shrapnel in my elbow, on the backwash of the Yalu. I’ve seen some pretty rough things in Korea, and I’ve seen some even rougher behind the wheel of that cab, but the way they were working that guy over—cool, smooth and without a wasted movement—made my throat dry out.

  I turned my cab into 25th Street, off Second Avenue, a few blocks from the East River—I’d just taken an old-maid schoolteacher home and was cutting back to the main drag—when my headlights caught the six of them.

  There were five kids, all in black leather jackets, and a guy with a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. The kids had him up against the wall of a clothing factory, and they were clipping him in the head and belly with those bricks. I roared down the street at them, going over the sidewalk to keep them in the beams, and honking my horn like mad.

  When they heard me, they backed off, and the guy fell on his face. They thought that was a good deal, thought they could finish him quicker that way, and went back at him.

  The kids started stomping him in the groin when he tried to struggle to his knees, then they kicked his head. They were wearing heavy army boots, and the guy on the sidewalk started bleeding. I could see it all as clearly as if it were daylight.

  They must have figured they’d done all they could to the guy, because they bent down trying to get the briefcase off him. I saw one of the kids bring his foot down full on the guy’s wrist.

  I screeched the cab to a stop right beside them and hauled my Still son wrench off the floor.

  Then I was out the door and around the cab. ‘Hey!’ I yelled, not actually thinking it would do any good, but what the hell, at least it would keep them off that bleeding slob on the sidewalk.

  Two of them came at me, both with bricks in their hands. Those kids weren’t sloppy street-fighters. They knew what they were doing. I’m a big boy, almost six-two, and they could see that; one came in high, the other low. The other three were busy breaking the guy’s wrist, trying to get that briefcase off him.

  The first kid was a puffy-nosed character, with long brown hair combed back into a duck’s-fanny hairdo, and he swung his brick the long way, aiming it at my chops. I swiveled a hip, and tossed a foot out. He stumbled over it, and I only hesitated a moment before chopping him with the wrench. I didn’t much care for the idea of clobbering a kid, but I saw the size of that brick, and my mind changed itself so fast!

  The wrench caught him alongside the head and he yowled good and loud. Then he went down, spilling into the gutter just as his buddy smashed me in the middle with his brick!

  It felt like someone’d overturned a cement wagon on me. The pain shot up my body, ran through my nerves, tingled in my fingertips, and numbed my legs, all at the same time. What a shot that kid was!

  I spun aside, before he could get leverage for a second pot at me, and kicked out almost wildly. It was my numbed leg, and I wasn’t quite sure what the damned thing would do. But it caught him on the knee, and his almost handsome face screwed up till he looked like I’d ripped out his liver. I took a short step and chopped him fast with the flat of my hand behind his ear. The kid moaned once and went down on one knee. I used my good leg and brought a knee up under the chin. A K.O. real fast; he went the way of his buddy.

  I started to spin halfway around to get the other three. All I saw was the guy lying there, bleeding like a downed heifer, and two of the kids tearing that briefcase off him, swearing like Civil War veterans. I had about a half second to wonder where the third punk was; then I found out real fast.

  He was right beside me, with a sockful of quarters. They must have been quarters. Pennies wouldn’t have put me to sleep that quickly. One full-bodied swipe.

  I went down, and everything was ever so black!

  Coming out of it was sicker than going down. I remembered when I had come to in the field hospital five miles from the front in Korea. I’d thought I was in a long white corridor, and somebody was calling my name, over and over, echoing down that long corridor of my mind for ever and ever.

  That’s what it was like. Someone was standing over me saying, ‘Campus, Campus, Campus,’ over and over again, and it was echoing in my head so loud.

  I screwed my eyes shut as tight as I could, and right about then the little man turned on his trip hammer inside my skull. He was mining for gray matter, and I thought sure my brains would tumble out of my ears. ‘W-water,’ I managed to gasp.

  A shadowy thing extended a tentacle, and there was a glass of water on the end of it. When another shadow propped me up, I let a little of the water slop into my mouth, and slowly my eyes sank back into my head. They cleared and I looked up into a four-day growth of beard.

  The growth was on a cop. I shut my eyes carefully; the last thing on this Earth I wanted to see was a cop. ‘Go away,’ I muttered, getting a nauseating taste of my own raw-blood lips.

  ‘You’re Neal Campus, right?’ he asked. His voice matched his face. His face had been hard, rough, and grizzled. I looked up at him again.

  ‘I wasn’t doing more than fifty, so help me God!’ That was when I realized I was in the hospital. ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ I almost shouted. I tried to sit up, but someone on the other side of the bed that I hadn’t seen before pushed me back.

  I tossed a look at the guy—it was an intern—and it must have been a pretty vicious look, because he let go quick. I sat up again. ‘I said what the hell am I doing here?’ I was so confused, I didn’t realize I was fainting again till they all slid off my vision, and black gushed into my head.

  The next time I came up the cops were gone and it was semidark in the room. The sterilized odor almost made me puke, and I came upright on the bed, clawing out.

  They pushed me back—or I should say she pushed me back. It was a nurse. As sweet and virginal-looking a thing as Johns Hopkins ever issued.

  Her voice floated to me, almost detached from her body. ‘You’ve had a nasty spill, Mr Campus. Take it easy now.’ I let her push me back without any trouble.

  ‘How—how long have I been here?’ I asked. My throat was dry as an empty gas tank.

  ‘Three days, Mr Campus. Now just lie back and take it easy. Doctor Eshbach said you were coming along nicely.’

  Three days. I’d been in the hospital three full days. Suddenly, faces came back to me. Three. Three days. Three faces on three hoods. A puffy-nosed kid with brown hair, slightly pudgy. An almost handsome kid with a Barrymore profile and sleepy eyes. A kid with buck teeth and a crew-cut—bringing an argyle sock full of coins down on my head.

  They were so clear in my mind, I felt I could reach out and touch them. I tried it. She took my hand. Then I peeled off again.

  This time the cop was clean-shaven, but it didn’t help his general appearance much. He said he had been to see me two days before—which made it five I’d been in the hospital—and that his name was Harrison, operating out of Homicide. I don’t quite know how I knew he was a cop, because he wasn’
t in uniform. But I knew. He was stockily built, square and almost immovable looking. His face was a pasty white, broken by dark shadows and black, bushy eyebrows. He looked like a short stack of newspapers.

  Harrison wore glasses—the old thin-rimmed wire kind—but it didn’t distract from his ferocious appearance. There was something in the rock-ribbed squareness of his jaw, the snapping expression in his flinty eyes, that instantly made me aware this cookie wasn’t playing games.

  They must have told him I was ready for visitors; he hurricaned into the room, slung a chair away from the wall and banged it down next to the bed.

  ‘You’ve been able to conk out of answering a few questions for five days now, Campus, but they tell me you’re okay today. I suggest you answer fast and straight. There’s an electric chair waiting if you don’t!’

  He spat it out fast, without any room for niceties or subleties. He meant it. I didn’t know what he was talking about, though.

  ‘Why the chair?’ I was surprised at my voice; it was a duck-rasp. It rattled out like hailstones and fell on to the floor.

  He worked his jaw muscles. The guy looked like he was trying to hold back from belting me. I didn’t know why he was so damned angry—I hadn’t done anything but get clobbered! Then he told me why they had the chair greased and waiting.

  ‘Pessler was dead when we got to him. His head stomped into raspberry jelly and three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of uncut diamonds missing. I was sent down there, Campus, and I saw that guy. He looked real bad.’

  I’ve seen and dealt with a lot of cops. The ones that gave me tickets, and the ones that took my statement at accidents; the ones that broke up tavern brawls and the ones that hauled me in with MP bands on their uniforms. I’ve seen them mad and indifferent, annoyed and savage. But I never saw one like this Harrison.

  ‘Look, fella,’ I said, ‘maybe you better back off some and let me in on what this is all about. All I know is that five kids were clubbing a guy, and when I tried to help him out, I got smacked for my trouble.’