“This is small potatoes. Why would your boss stick his finger in when he’s already got so much going on? Don’t seem likely to me.”
“It’s where it started for Longy, and he’s a sentimental guy. The numbers got him off his vegetable wagon on Prince Street. That’s after he sized up all those fancy ladies who came down from their apartments to shop with plenty of money to burn.”
“I still don’t get it.”
“Let’s say he killed two birds with one stone. He took their money and they weren’t bored anymore. Most of them are still hooked, but don’t like leaving their expensive digs to place their bets. That’s where you and your tough kids come in, working places that were once like home to Longy.”
“Anything else?”
“Won’t need all fifteen. I figure that three of your best will do it. Leave it to you to pick ‘em.”
During the next two weeks McDuffie met with everybody he needed to, and no one else. He shook hands with Sy Howard who ran the numbers bank over on Clinton to seal the deal. The three young punks he tapped for the job had been in and out of juvie court often enough to know the bailiff’s first name.
McDuffie recognized right from the get-go that folding the numbers in with paper deliveries was a sweet deal. The money was great and could only get better. He dumped his ’37 Ford for a ’41 Chevy, for the first time could afford ringside at Laurel Gardens, took Mo to catch stripper Georgia Sothern at the Empire, and at her insistence, shelled out big bucks for a new stove and refrigerator. Zwillman had the cops in his pocket making everything neat and clean.
There was some clean-up needed now and then. Like the time those three coon barbers tried to squeeze their policy runners into his territory. That’s when his hoods went to work. He laughed his ass off when they described how they laid in wait and picked off, one at a time, three guys and two women, kicking hell out of the men and slapping around the bimbos.
He couldn’t imagine that in only two years this sweet deal would turn sour. Zwillman’s nemesis, Richie the Boot Boiardo, had secretly called off their truce and was moving into the Third Ward. The Boot’s first move would be disguised as a circulation war between the Clarion and the Beacon.
The Pulitzer Prize winning Clarion smugly accepted the sobriquet “the New York Times of New Jersey,” and dismissed David Goldman’s Beacon as a cheap throwaway.
Goldman had emerged from Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen three decades earlier, and almost immediately had financially strapped newspaper publishers running for cover. Like a shark hunting in bloody waters, he picked off one weak paper after another, either looting it or merging it with a paper of his own. In the end, it would be a city with one less newspaper, and hundreds of lost jobs. Goldman took no prisoners. Ten years earlier he’d brought the printer and editorial unions of one newspaper to their knees. The newspaper failed and everything was auctioned off.
Herb Bix was an arrogant man secure in the knowledge that his Evening Clarion was a king-maker. Every public figure in New Jersey realized his career could be made or broken by Bix’s editorial writers. Four generations of Bixes had created an empire, with a dozen bureaus in New Jersey, another in Washington, correspondents on four continents, and a fleet of reporters covering the war in Europe and the Pacific. Bring on Goldman’s Beacon with its underpaid staff, primitive layout and grasping owner. He was ready.
Bix had no way of knowing that the battle had already begun on two fronts, and that the combatants didn’t give a damn about Pulitzer Prizes and foreign correspondents.
McDuffie had inherited his job on the frontline from his father, and like his old man, he treated his carriers like family. During the Depression, these kids helped keep their folks off the bread lines and out of the soup kitchens. These were tough kids and some of them, like Al Sweeney and Gino Sharkey, were down right mean as hell, but they toed the McDuffie line if they wanted to work. They were clean, neat, and courteous, giving their full names to new subscribers, and the customers were always addressed as mister this or missus that. To the kids it might be phony as hell, but the tips and gifts made it easy to swallow.
Joey might have ruled out ever working for the Clarion, but he still made his weekly trips to Marsucci’s office to see if a Beacon route had opened up. He had no way of knowing that the job would put him in the middle of the Ward’s numbers racket and a circulation street brawl.
All Joey could do was wait. He played it cool at Milt’s, lying about his father’s job prospects, while all the time haunted by Bob and Stan’s racial taunts. His weekly trips to the Peace grocery store confirmed that the two bullies were right, the Banciks had become white niggers.
To his surprise, he found himself drawn to Billy Spratlin, the one gang member, who from the very beginning, had been a big question mark. Why the hell was a rich kid like Billy hanging out at Milt’s? At first, Joey made no attempt to hide his envy, even resentment, for this intruder. It took a while for him to see that even with his nice clothes, a pocketful of change, and that big old house he lived in, Billy was someone he could talk to.
From the beginning, Billy realized he was something of an outsider at Milt’s, his family was different, he lived in a great house, had pocket money to spare, and better clothes. When he went along with the gang at Milt’s, it was a take-it-or-leave-it sort of thing.
To get to this point of acceptance wasn’t easy. His mother had pulled him out of Hackburne after he finished fifth grade at the upstate New York boarding school. She wanted him closer to home, to have a man in the house she jokingly told him, after his father was shipped to the Pacific. She broke the news to Billy in St. Albans while they were casting for lake trout from the Covington family dock on Lake Champlain.
“Things will be a lot different at St. Mark’s,” Margaret Spratlin said. “It will be hard at first, but you’re a whiz and I know it won’t take long for you to fit in.”
“St. Mark’s? I’m leaving Hackburne for St. Mark’s?” Billy forgot he had a casting rod in his hand and almost dropped it into the water. He remembered the kids and their folks who shared Sunday mass at St. Mark’s with him and his mom, dad and grandmother during the holidays. The clothes they wore, the way they acted up and even their haircuts were so different from what he was used to at Hackburne.
“Why mom?” Billy searched for the words to convey his dismay. “How about my plans for the summer? I’ve got invites to spend a week with Jason and another with Travis.”
“You’ll just have to tell them you won’t be coming. It won’t be all that bad. We still have three more weeks here at the cottage.”
“Then what?” Billy said. “Golly, mom, I won’t know anybody, or where they hangout. Have you thought of that?”
“Yes I have, and I’m not worried about you finding new friends. But the rules will be different, they always are when you switch from one school to another,” his mother said. “Your new buddies won’t be like the friends you’re leaving behind.”
“Rules, what rules? At Hackburne no one talked about rules, you just fit in or you didn’t. And if you didn’t, they booted you out.”
“No matter where you go to school, you’ve got to be accepted. If they don’t accept you, it won’t be easy. You just have to remember they’ll be looking you over, and that’s when you start living by their rules.”
Billy saw that his mother was averting her eyes, peering out over the lake as she reeled in her line. As she watched the bait skim across the surface of the water, she filled in the details. He would be leaving his new Schwinn racer at home and walking to school. The families of the kids he’d be paling around with can’t afford bikes. Father Schneider, his new pastor at St. Mark’s, had already been told to expect a new altar boy in the fall.
“Geez, mom, what can I say, seems you have it all figured out for me.”
Billy reeled in his line, emptied the unused bait into the lake, and they headed up the grassy knoll to the Covington cottage.
It only took about two weeks, or was it three,
before it all sunk in. September of 1943 was a hot one, lunchtime recess and after school stoop ball filled the void until footballs started flying. Billy had never played the game before, and it didn’t take long for him to see that it wasn’t a kid’s game. Mastering it would not be easy. He did pretty well partnering with Richie Maxwell and Joey Bancik, but it wasn’t until he and Carl Schroder almost knocked off the two kingpins, Stan and Bob Wysnoski, that he could sense the gang warming up to him.
“How much do you like watermelons?” Profanity Pump asked from the corner of the rear booth at Milt’s.
“Watermelons?” Billy said as he slid into the booth next to Joey.
“What the hell did I say,” Pump challenged. “Get the god damn wax out of your ears.”
“Yeah, I guess so, never thought much about it, but yeah, watermelon is okay.”
“Like it good enough to steal one?” Joey was looking him over. Their noses were no more than six inches apart.
“That’s right, from Springer’s Produce over on Springfield. You walk over, pick up one of those big babies, and then run like hell. Think you can do it?” Richie, seated across from him with Carl, said.
“Is this a joke?” Billy said. “It’s gotta be a joke.”
“Take a god damn look at us,” Pump said, “look real good. Does it look like we’re joking?”
Billy turned to Pump and fought off a smile as he tried to picture her bouncing down the street with her arms wrapped around a melon. “How about you, do you measure up?” he asked.
“Don’t worry your sweet ass about me,” she said, “it’s you we’re talking about.”
Billy saw that it would be now or never with this bunch. As he scanned their faces, he realized that Jason, Travis and Hackburne School were gone forever.
“Okay, I’m in,” Billy said. “Where does it go from here?”
“A couple of us will walk you over to Springer’s so’s you can size things up,” Joey said. “Then we’ll stand back and watch. Springer puts all of his melons on two big sidewalk stands. You grab two cantaloupes and run like hell. Pull it off and it’s the watermelon next week.”
“It ain’t a kid’s game,” Carl said. “Get nabbed and Springer will press charges. You’ll find your ass in juvie court.”
“It ain’t ol’ man Springer who you worry about,” Richie said, “he stays near the cash register next to the scales. It’s his son, big and mean as hell, that you keep your eye on. No way you’ll out run him. If he grabs you, it won’t be pretty.”
“Just ask Jerry Malone, he’s over at St. Jude’s now,” Joey said. “That big son of a bitch caught him stuffing apples in his pockets. Grabbed him before he made it around the corner, got him to the ground, jammed a knee into his back and held him until a cop showed up.”
“So what happened to Jerry?” Billy asked, at the same time kicking himself for agreeing to the melon caper.
“Went to juvie and judge orders his mom and dad to be there too,” Carl said. “That’s the worst part. The judge read them all the riot act. Warned what would happen the next time.”
“Jerry’s old man kicked hell out of him, could hear the yowling half-block away,” Joey said. “Next thing ya know, they move away and Jerry’s over in St. Jude’s.”
The following afternoon, Richie and Carl watched from in front of Gingold’s Pharmacy next door, as Billy walked over to Springer’s melon stands. He took a deep breath and failed miserably in his attempt to shake off his nerves. Have to be cool, he thought. Like I’m just passing by, then real fast grab those two babies and hightail it outta here. There’s the big guy over there in the back, coast is clear.
Billy ran for two blocks and didn’t stop until he was certain he was not being chased. He was drenched with sweat when he sat down on a tenement stoop to be joined by Richie and Carl.
“You did good,” Richie said. “Same time next Tuesday for the big one. Now hand ‘em over, they ain’t for you.”
It was midmorning when Billy returned to Springer’s the following Tuesday. The palms of his hands were slippery with sweat, so he rubbed them dry on his pants before grabbing a melon that had to weigh at least ten pounds. Can’t let this baby slip, he thought. Be nabbed for sure. I got it, right here against my belly. Not too fast now, get past the drug store and I’m home free.
Billy never let on that he had hedged his bet from the beginning. Carl’s warning about juvie court had sunk in. He made sure he had two bucks in coins in his pocket, just in case and had rehearsed what to say if the cops grabbed him. “Gee, officer, it must have slipped my mind. Here it is, got the money right here. Just forgot, that’s all.”
Richie, Joey and Profanity Pump were slurping sodas in the rear booth of Milt’s when Carl burst in. “You can’t guess what I just saw. Billy lugging a big ass watermelon over to the Exeter. Looked like he was about to cave-in when he sat down with the melon in his lap.”
“A watermelon?” Joey said. “Jesus Christ, it’s Tuesday. Did you ever think he’d really do it.”
“Damn, I forgot all about it,” Richie said. “More a joke than anything. Who’d a thunk it?”
“He snatched the two cantaloupes, that ain’t so hard,” the Pump said. “But a god damn watermelon, right in front of ol’ man Springer and his big ox son, that’s really the shits.”
The quartet walked out to the sidewalk, clearly at a loss as to what to do next, “Let’s say we go over and kiss his ass for the good job he’s done,” Pump said. “Unless you guys have a better idea.”
Billy was resting with his elbows on the top step of the Exeter entrance. He studied the four faces in front of him, then much like a kid admiring his new puppy, reached down and patted the melon. “Gotta say it’s a real beauty.”
“So you pulled it off,” the Pump said, “took a real pair of balls.”
“There’s a first time for everything,” Carl said. “Bejesus H. Christ, a watermelon from Springer’s and in broad daylight, tops it all.”
“First time, what the hell do you mean ‘first time,’” Billy said.
“We were putting you on, see what you were made of,” Richie said. “It was Pump’s idea at first, then we all jumped in.”
“You’re saying none of you ever stole a watermelon from Springer’s, is that what you’re telling me?”
“That’s right,” Pump said. “Maybe apples, pears, bananas, you know small stuff that we could put in our pockets. No cantaloupes either.”
“What about Jerry Malone?”
“Nope, no Jerry Malone either. Made him up, too,” Joey said. “Had to make it sound good so we threw in juvie, the judge and an old man who kicked hell out of poor little Jerry.”
“The Pump gets most of the credit,” Richie said. “We were laughing our asses off when we put it all together, how the new kid from the big house on Court Place would handle it.”
Carl used his all-purpose Boy Scout knife to carve-up the watermelon, and they spent the rest of the afternoon spitting watermelon seeds onto the sidewalk. After the heist, none of the gang said “nice job” or anything like that, but Billy could feel the change. He showed them that he measured up, and they had to let him in.
About the time he turned thirteen, Billy Spratlin began to notice big changes on how he looked at things. Sex was the welcome intruder whenever he put two or three thoughts together. As Carl Schroder put it, “Well, kid, you now know why the good Lord gave you a right hand.”
It seemed to Billy that the neighborhood thrived on sexual temptation. It was everywhere. You didn’t even have to look for it, it just jumped out at you. Take the Good Fellows Lodge’s stag smoker every third Friday night at the Krameir Mansion.
Taking buckets of beer money with them, the Krameirs long ago fled to the green hills of the Orange Mountains overlooking Newark. Their brewery still pumped out its “Beer of Cheer for People We Hold Dear,” or “Ale for the Hale,” and in the spring, “Krameir Bock for Men of Rock.”
There were still a few people aroun
d who remembered the old days with the big parties, important people, and elegant carriages and automobiles. But to the handful of neighborhood kids in the know, the relic was important for its monthly stags.
During one of his nocturnal wanderings, the sweet sounds of Benny Goodman’s clarinet and Harry James’ trumpet pulled Eight-Ten to the east side of the mansion. He peeked through the ill-fitting drapes on one of the lower windows and discovered a pornographic bonanza. True to his calling, he tipped off a few of his young friends at Milt’s.
The horny bunch would soon discover that a crack in a warped window frame presented another opportunity to further their carnal knowledge. By stacking themselves totem-fashion, two or three at a time, and squinting one eye and then the other into the basement below, they were introduced to tribalism, “69,” bestiality, and just about everything else. The grainy black-and-white film was accompanied by Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw records. “Sing, Sing, Sing” was the Good Fellows’ favorite for all the rock-em-sock-em gangbangs. “Begin the Beguine” set the mood for the more sedate offerings.
Only once did they come close to being found out. That was after the totem collapsed into the shrubbery when they were left gasping for air while watching three couples in a shower stall. Eight-Ten on the bottom got so excited he began to shake. Billy had been high man on the totem, he fell on top of Eight-Ten. Everyone held their breath. Finally, from beneath the pile there arose a mirthful, “Aheh, aheh. Aheh, aheh.”
It had been quite a while since Richie, Joey, Freddy and Carl began piecing it all together. Reluctantly at first, they compared the sounds coming from their parents’ bedrooms, and after debunking virgin birth, agreed that mom and dad had been fucking. With his father still serving Uncle Sam as an Army engineer on Okinawa, he could add nothing from home to the sexual stewpot boiling over at Milt’s. Thanks to the monthly Good Fellows’ sex shows, Eight-Ten with his glossies from the Empire Burlesque, and Profanity Pump and the crude jokes at Milt’s, Billy soon caught up.
Despite all the second-hand knowledge he was collecting, Billy found it hard to picture his mother having sex with his father. Sure, his mom was beautiful, his dad was handsome, but as hard as he tried, it just didn’t fit.
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