Hard City

by Clark Howard

  The saleslady smiled back. “Your mother’s very lucky to have a little boy like you,” she said solemnly.

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  Making it out of Woolworth’s without incident, Richie immediately ducked around the corner of Karlov, the side street, and trotted a block to Washington Boulevard, a residential street. Only then did he slow to a normal walk, transfer the watchbands to his good pocket, and button up his coat. It was four in the afternoon, still light as the winter days now grew longer, but still bitingly cold. Richie now had a new sweatshirt, a pair of earmuffs he had stolen and—finally, thankfully—a new pair of shoes with no holes in the soles. He had bought them with money changed for nine dollars worth of pennies he got out of the gumball machine he’d snatched and later pried open.

  Coming toward him on the same side of the street was a tall man in a topcoat with the collar turned up. Richie thought he recognized him from somewhere—cop, truant officer, welfare caseworker? Taking no chances, he dashed across the boulevard, dodging traffic, and watched over his shoulder as the man went on his way. Only when he was well past him did Richie realize what had made the man seem so familiar: tall, slim, light-haired, he had reminded Richie of his father. Richie paused and looked back at him again, then shook his head and continued on his way.

  After two o’clock on weekday afternoons, Richie usually moved freely around the city without fear of truant officers. Schools let out between two and three, and he guessed that most “school cops” were back in their offices by then. There were still the welfare investigators and the juvenile cops, but they normally were after individuals, and looked for them in specific places they had frequented in the past. School cops were the most dangerous; they cruised, looking for anybody they could catch.

  The time between nine A.M., when he slipped out of the bowling alley, and two P.M., when he felt free to be on the streets, were the most precarious for Richie. He had learned as a foster-home runaway to avoid places that school cops usually looked: movie houses that were open in the morning, pool halls, pinball parlors, bowling alleys. Never under any circumstances did he show up at Cascade before three or four o’clock in the afternoon. Likewise, he never tried selling shoplifted merchandise in the bowling alley. Cascade was his place of steady employment as well as his place to sleep; he felt safe there, and he was careful to do nothing to compromise that security.

  The place where Richie eventually hid the most between nine and two was in the main public library downtown on Michigan Boulevard. The block-long building, which sat facing Grant Park between Randolph and Washington, was a veritable maze of rooms in which an inconspicuous boy with a notebook could go virtually unnoticed. And it was a place, Richie had learned, that school cops never checked, on the theory that truants from school would not go to a library, because it was too much like school. Richie had shoplifted a spiral notebook and an elementary-school dictionary, and carried them wherever he went during school hours on weekdays. He found that cops on the beat, streetcar conductors, and others rarely gave him a second glance when he was carrying the books. In the library, where he was always quiet and well-behaved, he even received an occasional smile from one of the librarians. Once he overheard one say quietly to another, “It’s so refreshing to see a poor kid like that coming here instead of loitering in front of some pool hall.”

  Richie loved the library. Under the pretext of preparing a report for school, he was able to read early issues of the Chicago Tribune, which were kept in large, heavy binders in a special room. Richie read newspaper accounts of Civil War battles, Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, the death of Billy the Kid and Jesse James, Teddy Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill, the beginning of World War I, the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, and many other events that galvanized his curiosity.

  When not in the old newspapers section, or roaming the special exhibit rooms that featured temporary displays on a single subject—great ships, oil exploration, Eskimo life—Richie would spend hours in the reference section, poring over every imaginable kind of encyclopedia, almanac, year book, atlas, guide, and whatever else he could find. Sometimes when he got carried away on a subject, such as how a motion picture was made, he lost track of time and stayed in the library long after the streets had become safe for him.

  After Richie had been on his own for a few weeks and felt reasonably secure, he went back to the neighborhood where he had previously lived. A boy who had been his best friend, Stan Klein, was sitting in front of a candy store with another kid, Bobby Casey. It was Bobby who saw Richie first. “Jesus Christ, look what crawled up out of the sewer,” Bobby said.

  “Hey, Richie, where the hell you been?” Stan asked with a grin, happy to see him. They had lived in the same building on Adams Street, and it had been with Stan that Richie had stolen the first time. For a while Richie and Stan had been inseparable; after Richie was sent to foster homes, Stan would sometimes hide him or give him money when he ran away.

  “The cops were around twice asking about you,” Stan told him.

  Shrugging, Richie sat down with them. “I’m running again,” he said matter-of-factly. “They put my old lady in a place to get her off drugs; I didn’t want to go back to no foster homes.” Normally Richie never referred to his mother as his “old lady,” but since Stan and Bobby both did, he seemed naturally to use their vernacular here.

  “Hope you ain’t thinking of working with us again,” Bobby Casey said flatly. “We ain’t making enough for two, much less three.” Richie had teamed up with Stan and Bobby several months earlier for a while, committing thefts of gumball machines.

  Stan gave Bobby a disgusted look. “Richie can come back in with us any time he wants to,” he said evenly. “When there was three of us, we made a hell of a lot more scores than we can make with just two of us. I can think of a dozen machines right now that three guys could grab that two can’t.” Stan turned to Richie. “You wanna come back in with us, Richie?”

  Richie shrugged. “Sure, I guess.” He knew that Bobby Casey did not like him, was jealous because Stan did like him; he also knew Bobby was tougher than him and could beat him up if he wanted to. But at the moment he could not concern himself with that. He needed money to get by, and he could steal more with Stan and Bobby than he could alone. Stan was the leader anyway; if Stan said Richie could join them again, there was nothing Bobby could do about it. And Stan would not let Bobby beat up Richie just because he didn’t like him. If Bobby had a legitimate reason to challenge Richie, that would be another matter; Stan would not interfere, and Richie would have to take his whipping.

  “Where are you living?” Stan asked.

  “Cascade Lanes,” Richie said. “I ain’t told nobody else that,” he added, glancing at Bobby Casey. His implication was clear to Stan.

  “Don’t worry,” Stan assured him. “We won’t tell nobody either.”

  “I can’t go out nights,” Richie informed him.“I get regular work spottin’ pins and I don’t wanna lose it.”

  “We ain’t been going out nights anyways,” Stan said. “Bobby’s old man’s boozing again an’ makes him stay home nights so’s he’ll have somebody to kick around.”

  Bobby Casey blushed and looked away, causing Richie to feel a pang of sympathy for him. Bobby was an unsmiling youth with tightly curled blond hair above shifty, unfriendly eyes. Somehow feeling Richie’s sympathy, further embarrassed by it, he glared at Richie. “At least my old man ain’t no junkie,” he said spitefully.

  “All right, lay off,” Stan told him. “Didn’t none of us pick who had us. My old lady brings home a different guy two or three times a week from the bar where she works, so what?” For a moment he stared off into space, a clean-cut boy with ordinary features made irregular by a slightly large lower lip that tended to give him a pout when he was concentrating. An easy smiler, he liked most people; although a good street fighter, he never bullied. “How ’bout Saturdays?” he asked Richie now.

  “Yeah, I can go Saturdays.”
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br />   “Okay, meet us by the el tracks on Crawford, Saturday at ten o’clock. I’ll have some machines lined up.”

  “If you don’t show up,” Bobby Casey said, “we’ll just figure you turned chicken.”

  Ignoring him, Richie bobbed his chin at Stan. “See you Saturday.”

  When Richie left, he walked past the building in which he and his mother had once lived, where Stan still lived, and was swept by a moment of melancholy. He had known some bad times in that building—but at least he had not been all alone. He and his mother had gone through those bad times together. Her being there, Richie had begun to realize, counted for something.

  He wondered how she was doing in the hospital. Briefly he considered calling Miss Menefee and asking if the caseworker knew, but his instincts quickly vetoed that idea. He was afraid they might trace the call and catch him in the phone booth, like he’d seen happen in the movies. Anyway, he was pretty sure his mother was doing okay.

  She usually did when she had somebody to take care of her.

  One of the places Richie hung around to sell his shoplifted merchandise was the Midwest Athletic Club on Hamlin Avenue, where local boxers trained. On the second floor over a row of stores, it was a long, high-ceilinged place with three regulation-size training rings, heavy punching bags on chains, speed bags on ball-bearing swivels, corner areas with full-length mirrors on the wall for shadow-boxing and skipping rope, and complete locker and shower facilities in the rear. Across one side of the room were high windows that had to be opened with a long pole and looked out across the avenue to Garfield Park. On the other long wall was a balcony of spectator seats where for twenty-five cents one could spend all afternoon watching fighters work out.

  It was worth a quarter to Richie to get into the balcony; most of the spectators, ninety percent of whom were men, were gamblers, grifters, hustlers, and others of dubious respectability. Almost without exception they were open to anything shady.

  “Hey, mister, wanna buy a watchband?” Richie would ask. “Brand-new, half price.”

  Without a second thought, most of them said, “Lemme see ’em.”

  Richie would bring out his assortment of watchbands—or Zippo lighters, or Parker fountain pens, or cuff link sets, whatever he had—and the sharpies in the gym balcony would make their selection. Rarely did Richie get the half price he asked for; more often he settled for whatever they offered. “Give you two bits for this one, kid. Take it or leave it.”

  Once when Richie was peddling genuine leather wallets, one man, when he reached for the money to pay Richie, pulled back his coat and exposed a holstered pistol and a detective’s badge on his belt. Instantly Richie felt ill. His face must have shown it because the man said, “Relax, kid,” and paid him without even asking his name. After that, Richie felt totally at ease in the balcony of the Athletic Club gym. Some of the regulars even nicknamed him Marshall Field, Jr. It was a rare occasion that he was unable to dispose of whatever he had to sell there.

  One afternoon when Richie was in Midwest earlier than usual, he saw down on the gym floor that one corner of the big room was being used by a slightly built older man and four boys in their mid-teens who were wearing boxing gear. The older man, who was bald from the top of his ears up and had an almost pained expression on his face, was giving the boys instructions in the proper delivery of a left jab. Richie was fascinated. He was aware that fighters had to train to stay in condition, but for some reason it had never entered his head that the training might include instruction in how to fight.

  When Richie finished his merchandising, which that day consisted of snap-on belt buckles, he went down to the gym floor and stood off in a corner, watching. The bald man—whom Richie heard called “Myron”—finished talking to the four boys about the left jab and had them stand in front of the mirrored walls practicing it. When Myron came over to a bench to pick up a towel and pat the back of his neck with it, Richie walked up to him.

  “Hey, mister, you teaching those guys to be fighters?” he asked.

  “Trying my best,” Myron replied wryly.

  “Could you teach me, mister?”

  “I think you’re a little young yet, sonny. For club fights you’re supposed to be fourteen.”

  “Club fights, what’s that?”

  “Amateurs,” Myron said. “All the athletic clubs sponsor young amateurs. Kind of in teams. They fight at the different clubs. But like I said, you gotta be fourteen.”

  “I’ll be fourteen in a few months,” Richie lied. “Couldn’t I just learn while I’m thirteen?”

  “You’re kinda small even for thirteen,” Myron observed.

  “I was sick for a while, but I’m okay now,” Richie explained.

  “Well, it don’t matter anyways,” the bald man told him. “Midwest only sponsors four kids and I already got four. Come back and see me next year. Couple of my kids’ll be moving up to Golden Gloves then. Try to build yourself up, meantime.”

  “Sure,” Richie said, disappointed. As he slouched away, a sudden thought occurred to him, “Hey, mister,” he said, turning back, “what if I just watched? Over in the corner by myself?” Myron saw a pleading in the boy’s eyes. “I really need to learn to fight, mister,” Richie said.

  “Jeez, I don’t know,” Myron worried. “I don’t wanna be responsible for you hanging around a few days and then thinking you’re a tough guy.”

  “It won’t be like that, mister, I promise,” Richie pleaded. “I’ll learn. I really will.”

  “All right, I guess,” Myron finally agreed, with the most pained expression yet. “You’ll have to stay over there out of the way, though. Don’t bother nobody. And don’t say I told you it was okay.”

  “Thanks, mister! Thanks a lot!”

  Taking off his coat and sweatshirt, Richie stood in his undershirt in the corner, studying how the four boys in boxing gear were practicing the left jab. Presently he began doing it himself. What he did not realize was that he was not watching the boys themselves, but rather their reflections in the mirror; consequently, he had assumed a left-handed stance and was practicing a right jab. Myron, watching, felt sorry for him because he was so pale and thin, while the boys Myron was training were well-nourished and ruddy. When he saw Richie using a southpaw stance, the trainer simply thought he was a natural lefthander.

  Richie practiced the jab as long as the other boys did, then copied them as they did some calisthenics Myron showed them. Only when Myron finally said, “Okay, knock off. See yez tomorrow at three,” did Richie put his sweatshirt and coat back on to leave. Walking out the door, he waved to Myron and the bald man nodded glumly at him.

  “See you tomorrow,” Richie called.

  “Yeah, yeah.” Myron did not really expect to see him again.

  Richie felt elated as he hurried toward the bowling alley—he was learning to fight!—but when he got there, his buoyant spirits were rudely shattered. Bobby Casey was waiting outside.

  “I wanna talk to you,” Bobby said menacingly. “Come here.”

  Knowing what was coming, Richie went over to him. Richie could have cut and run, but he refused to do that, ever. On the schoolyard, the street, wherever it happened, he never gave any bully the satisfaction of running from him. Richie had learned long ago that if he stood and took his licking, the humiliation was less than if he ran, was caught, and then had to take it anyway.

  “What do you want?” he asked Bobby Casey.

  “I want you to forget about coming back in with Stan and me, that’s what I want,” Bobby said belligerently, poking a stiff forefinger against Richie’s thin chest. “Him and me’s doing just fine without you, see?”

  “Stan said you’d do better with a third guy—”

  Bobby grabbed the front of Richie’s coat with both hands and jerked him forward. “We don’t need to do better!” He shook Richie back and forth. “An’ we don’t need no chicken like you hangin’ around!”

  “I’m no chicken,” Richie protested. “I’ll do anything
you’ll do— ”

  “Yeah, anything but fight!” Bobby reminded him scornfully. “Just stay the fuck away, you hear me?” He let go of Richie’s coat and shoved him back. “You hear me?” he insisted.

  “Yeah, I hear you,” Richie said, feeling his face flush, his throat constrict.

  “You goddamn well better!”

  Bobby stalked off. Tears welled in Richie’s eyes and he hated it, but he could not control them. The bastards! he thought, infuriated. The dirty sons of bitches, all of them! Bobby Casey and every bully that had ever shoved him around on the schoolyard just to get a laugh from the other kids.

  He’d get even someday, he swore in silent, surging rage.

  7

  Sitting on the curb across the street from 3318 West Walnut, Richie, now a runaway for six weeks, studied the building and found that he was able to recall exactly how the apartment had looked seven years earlier when he and his mother had lived there with Estelle. As he sat there remembering, he periodically glanced down the block at a heavyset man leaning in a doorway. The man didn’t seem to be paying any attention to him.

  Looking back at 3318, he pictured the apartment. It had a small living room with a sofa that had three individual cushions on it; that was where he had slept, in a bed his mother made up for him every night. It had not been a comfortable bed; the cushions never stayed straight and he rolled off onto the floor at least once every night. There was a double bed in the bedroom, but Richie’s mother and Estelle slept in it. The rest of the apartment consisted of a tiny kitchen, with a bathroom directly next to it.

  They had lived on the first floor. Upstairs was a family with two daughters, Helen and Dorothy. Helen had been fourteen; Richie’s mother often hired her to take care of him when she and Estelle went out for the evening. Chloe would give Helen money to take Richie and Helen’s nine-year-old sister Dorothy to a double-feature at the Kedzie Annex. When the show was over and they returned home, Helen would send Dorothy up to bed while she remained with Richie until his mother got home. Richie had hated coming home from the movie house: although Helen pretended to like him when adults were around, she delighted in asserting her authority over him and mistreating him when they were alone. She frequently slapped his face and made fun of him because he had no father. And she warned him against complaining about the treatment. “If you tell on me, I’ll sneak in some night when you’re sleeping and snip your thing off with a pair of scissors,” she threatened.