Hard City

by Clark Howard

  “Bell ring?” Richie gasped as Myron took his mouthpiece from him.

  “No, it was stopped. You got it on a TKO.”

  “I won again,” Richie grinned happily. “I won again!”

  “You won again,” Myron confirmed. Winking at Richie, he almost smiled.

  Later, riding the streetcar back to the West Side, Richie thought about the boy he had fought. “I wonder how he feels right now?”

  “Like a piano fell on him,” Myron guessed.

  “Bet he’ll have scared eyes next time he fights,” Richie said.

  “Probably,” Myron agreed. “He won’t have a lot of confidence, I don’t imagine, not after a licking like that. Maybe he’ll only fight one or two more times. When the confidence starts to go, you might as well quit. You ain’t dependable anymore.”

  Richie became quiet after Myron said that. He thought about it all the way back to the West Side.

  At seven o’clock on Sunday morning, Richie awoke and sat up on the side of the davenport in the ladies’ lounge. The red linoleum tile was cool on the bottoms of his feet. Untangling one leg from his army surplus blanket, he rose and went into the nearest stall to urinate. He was careful always to put the toilet seat back down, lest the cleaning woman become suspicious. At one of the sinks he washed his face and wet-combed his hair. From a cigar box he got out toothbrush and paste and brushed his teeth. He put back on the clothes he had worn after showering at the Laramie Park A.C. the previous night.

  Dressed, Richie used paper towels to wipe down the sink so the cleaning woman wouldn’t find it wet. Picking up the wrappers from two Butterfinger bars, he tossed them into a tall metal receptacle with a hinged opening. He folded his blanket into a precise square block and put his pillow inside the top fold. A paperback copy of The Great Gatsby went into the cigar box.

  With everything under one arm, Richie turned off the fluorescent light and opened the door a crack. Listening carefully, he heard no sound in the great empty bowling alley. The cleaning people did not come as early on Sundays because Cascade did not open until noon. Richie always checked for sound and presence anyway; despite his bragging to Linda about the bowling alley being “his,” he never completely got over the fear of being in there all alone. Only in the ladies’ lounge, with the tall metal wastebasket braced against the door, did he ever completely relax.

  Moving quietly into the corridor, Richie went up two doors to the locker room. The lockers were fifteen inches square, stacked five high, ten across, covering three walls of the room, with a center island of back-to-back units in the middle, a total of two hundred and ten small lockers. Although Richie had once kept padlocks on three of them, now he kept only two: one for his blanket and pillow, the other for his personal items. His clothes he now kept on hangers in a full-size locker at the gym. Working the combinations to his padlocks, he stowed his things and left the locker room. A few moments later he was downstairs letting himself into the alley through a fire door.

  An hour later, he had finished breakfast at the corner drugstore and was getting on a Pulaski Road streetcar to meet Stan and Bobby.

  In four hours that Sunday, the three boys stole, in broad daylight, three gumball machines, two peanut machines, one Beeman’s gum machine, one Arcade Movie Stars machine which disbursed cardboard photographs of cowboy stars, and one Chiclets gum machine. From them they secured forty-three dollars worth of pennies, which they rolled in fifty-cent tubes after each theft and cashed in at stores in the next neighborhood before stealing machines there. As usual, the jimmied machines were left in garbage cans in the alley where they were pried open. The boys never bothered with the remaining contents of any of them, not even the red-and-yellow striped gumballs which were “winners” and could be exchanged in stores for nickel candy bars. The only exception was the Arcade machine, which Richie smashed the back of in order to go through the cards for photos of Buck Jones. Enduring scathingly derisive remarks from Bobby Casey, he found and pocketed six of them.

  When they were through for the day, having made fourteen dollars each, they used the extra dollar to buy hot dogs and soda pop from a street vendor and sat on the curb to eat. That was when Richie told them he was quitting.

  “You yellow punk!” Bobby Casey said at once, incensed.

  “Shut up,” said Stan. Studying Richie for a moment, he asked, “Why? What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing’s the matter,” Richie said. “It’s just that I’m making enough at the bowling alley and the gym to get along okay, so I figure why take chances if I don’t have to?”

  Bobby Casey was seething. “I always knew you was a chicken-shit prick!”

  Richie turned on him. “What the fuck’s eating you, man? You never wanted me to come in with you in the first place!”

  Dropping his hot dog, Bobby stood up. “Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to, you little bastard?”

  “Shut up!” Stan ordered. “Sit down!” he snapped to Bobby. To Richie he said, with an edge, “You mean you’re quitting on us because you got enough to get along on? What about us?” Stan stared coldly at him. “We ain’t got jobs, Richie. My old lady sleeps around and don’t come home every night; me and my sister have to buy groceries and sometimes even pay the fucking rent on Saturdays. Bobby’s old man blows his paycheck on booze and leaves his mother up the creek and Bobby has to come through with some help or his mother and little brothers and sisters go hungry and maybe even get evicted. You know, in a way you’re lucky you don’t have to worry about nobody but yourself. Which,” he accused, “it looks like is all you are worrying about.”

  “It’s not just that I’m getting along okay,” Richie tried to explain. “It’s that I’m scared of getting caught,” he admitted. “My mother’s probably gonna be getting out of the hospital pretty soon—I don’t know how long they keep them in there; I guess until they don’t want dope no more—anyway, I want to be here to help her when they turn her loose. I don’t want to be in the juvenile home or someplace—”

  “You saying we’re gonna get caught, asshole?” Bobby demanded.

  “I’m saying we could get caught,” Richie answered, to Stan, not Bobby. That infuriated Bobby even more and he jumped to his feet again.

  “Get up!” he ordered. “I’m gonna whip your ass!”

  Richie remained sitting, looking up at Bobby. He was certain he could do to Bobby Casey just what he had done to the Laramie Park fighter in the ring the previous night. He had seen Bobby fight; he was a grunting, swearing, wild-swinging street fighter whom, from a crouch, Richie knew he could uppercut to a pulp. Which, if he did it in front of Stan, would totally humiliate Bobby. Getting his ass kicked by the kid he had bullied since the day they met would be more than Bobby could take. He would lose his confidence completely. Myron’s words of the previous night came back to Richie: “When the confidence starts to go . . . you ain’t dependable anymore.” Bobby would not be dependable anymore—and Stan would be left with him.

  For a long time, when Richie was training on his own in the corner of the gym, he had fantasized about Bobby Casey being the first kid against whom he would fight back. That had all changed when Myron had put him on the club team; a kid he had never seen before, who had never done anything to him, had been the first one against whom he fought back. Since then there had been three others, two of whom had ended up bleeding and helpless in the face of Richie’s attack. The thought of doing the same thing to Bobby Casey was almost too delicious to pass up. But he had to.

  “I ain’t fighting you, Bobby,” he said.

  “You gutless motherfucker,” Bobby said, and kicked him in the ankle. Grabbing his ankle, Richie turned angry red. Stan grabbed Bobby by the sleeve and pulled him back to the curb.

  “Leave him alone,” Stan said. He had been sticking up for Richie so long that it was the natural thing to do. When Bobby tried to get back up, Stan drew back a fist. That was all he had to do. Stan rarely had to fight, mostly he only had to threaten.

&nbs
p; “Pansy cocksucker,” Bobby snarled. “Go on, beat it! We don’t need you!”

  “Okay,” Stan said quietly to Richie. “You’re out.” He looked at the gutter between his shoes. “Maybe we’ll see you around.”

  “Sure,” Richie said. “See you.”

  Taking his hot dog and soda pop with him, Richie rose and walked away, gritting his teeth to keep from limping on the ankle Bobby Casey had kicked.

  Richie had learned enough from Myron to go straight to the gym to take care of his ankle. Although open seven days a week, Sunday was the gym’s slowest day; when Richie got there, he saw only three young novice fighters, fresh from the recent Golden Gloves tournament, working out to get ready for their respective professional debuts. Someday that’ll be me, he thought, as he limped past the training rings to the locker room.

  Removing his shoes, socks, and trousers, he took a clean towel from the shelf and, at the icebox, rolled enough crushed ice into it to make a compress. Sitting on a bench in his undershorts, he folded the compress around his ankle and held it in place. Benny Stein, one of the novices, came in to shower, and asked, “Hey, Richie, wha’ happened to your foot?”

  “Bowling pin nicked me while I was setting pins this morning,” Richie said. “Don’t say nothing to Myron if you see him, okay.”

  “Check.” When he had stripped off his sweaty training clothes, Benny walked over naked and asked, “Want me to tape it for you after?”

  Richie shook his head. “It ain’t that bad. Thanks, Ben.”

  Richie kept the compress on for two minutes, off for a minute, then back on, and after half an hour the swelling had almost completely disappeared. Tossing out the ice and putting the wet towel in a hamper, Richie took off the rest of his clothes, hung them in his locker, and got another clean towel from the shelf. In one of the stalls he took a long, warm shower and washed his hair. After he finished and dried off, he examined a slight abrasion over the peak of his ankle, swathed it with iodine, and covered it with a gauze pad and a strip of adhesive.

  Back at his locker, he dressed in a pair of inexpensive cotton trousers and a short-sleeve shirt he had bought in Goldblatt’s Bargain Basement. He had two pairs of shoes now, one for “good” wear when he went to meet Linda, and two new pair of argyle socks that he alternated, washing one pair each night.

  Leaving the gym, wearing his Midwest A.C. jacket, Richie walked west on Madison to the same drugstore at which he had eaten breakfast that morning. Loitering next to the entrance, he watched down Pulaski Road until he saw Linda come around the corner from Washington. Feeling a warm surge at the sight of her, he dodged traffic in the middle of the block to go meet her.

  “You’re going to get hit by a car someday,” she nagged at once, as they slipped their arms around each other’s waist.

  “The car that’s fast enough to hit me ain’t been made yet,” Richie bragged.

  “Oh, sure. Faster than a speeding bullet. Can you leap tall buildings in a single bound too?” Before he could reply, she quickly got in, “And stop saying ‘ain’t.’ ”

  “I ain’t gonna say it again,” he promised. Linda pinched his arm for punishment.

  “Did you win last night?” she asked.

  “I always win. Four straight now.”

  It had originally been Richie’s intent not to tell Linda that he had been made a member of the Midwest team; he simply planned to show her that he could fight the next time someone tried pushing him around. But after his second win he had not been able to contain the secret. “Guess what!” he told her in a burst of exuberance when they met in the park the next day. “Myron’s letting me fight with the other guys! I mean, really fight! I’ve got my own trunks and ring shoes, and he’s got a jacket ordered for me and everything! He even took me to a dentist and got me a mouthpiece!”

  “Aren’t you afraid you’ll get hurt, Richie?” she asked, young-girl concern in her eyes. “You don’t know how to fight.”

  “I do!” he exclaimed. “I’ve been learning for weeks, practicing and training in the gym. I know how to jab and hook and uppercut, I know stance, I know—”

  “What’s a mouthpiece?” she interrupted.

  “Oh. It’s a piece of hard rubber that’s made to fit over your teeth. Keeps them from getting broken.”

  He had spent most of their time together that day telling her all about everything that had happened from the night he subbed for Sammy Dutro, the special training Myron had given him the following week, how the other guys on the team, even Dutro, who was the same weight as Richie, had made him feel welcome, made him feel like one of them, and how he had subsequently won his second fight the following week. Linda was impressed but skeptical.

  “How can you be sure you’re not going to get hurt?” she worried. Richie shrugged.

  “I’m not sure. A guy’s bound to get hurt sooner or later. But you can still win, even if you do get hurt. That’s the main thing—winning.” His expression hardened a little. “And not being afraid to fight back.”

  “It never bothered me that you didn’t fight back,” Linda told him quietly.

  “It bothered me,” Richie said, staring off away from her. “You don’t know how it feels to have everybody think you’re a sissy. Even girls.”

  “Not this girl.” She had put her arms around his neck and kissed him lovingly on the lips, a long, arousing kiss that made both of them wish they had a lot more privacy than the park provided. That was when they decided to start going to movies on Sunday afternoon, which was where Linda was supposed to be anyway.

  They would sit in the back row of the balcony so that no one would be behind them and they could kiss and neck when they felt like it, which was frequently. Richie loved the taste of Linda’s lips and mouth, the smell of her breath; there was a sense of warm milk about kissing her. He liked tasting too the light sweat that exuded just under her ears when she became warm. Now and then, perhaps once during the feature and once during the short subject, she would allow his hand to move over and cover her left breast, leaving it there until they both felt her nipple hardening under the cotton bras she had lately begun wearing. Then she would gently take his hand away and put it somewhere less compromising. She was always acutely aware of his feelings for her, how important she was in his strange young existence. She regularly gave him reassurances of her own feelings for him—with her kisses, the weekly “feels,” and expressions of her worry, which was sincere and genuine. What reassurances she got from him, she had to subtly extract.

  “Do you think she’s pretty?” she would ask of Elizabeth Taylor when they saw National Velvet.

  “Sure, she’s pretty,” Richie replied guilelessly. “She’s a movie star; she’s supposed to be pretty.”

  After an appropriate moment of silence, Linda would sigh and say, “I wish I was pretty like that,” and Richie would realize what was expected of him.

  “I think you’re a lot prettier than she is.”

  “Oh, I am not. I’m plain and I know it.”

  “You’re not either. You’re just as pretty as that girl on the screen is.”

  “It’s sweet of you to say so, but you don’t mean it,”

  “I do so mean it. I think you’re prettier than any girl I’ve ever seen.”

  “Really?”

  “Honest to God.”

  There was more kissing then, with the lips parted a little, and maybe an extra feel for good measure.

  After the movie, Richie would walk Linda back to her neighborhood near Tilton Elementary. They started out walking with their arms around each other again, but as they progressed closer to where Linda lived and was known, they abandoned that in favor of holding hands, then yielded even that simply to walk side by side. Her father still did not permit her to go out with boys.

  “See you next Sunday?” she always asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Be careful next week. Stay out of trouble.”

  “Sure.”

  “Good luck next Saturday. Hope y
ou win.”

  “Thanks,” Richie said. “I’ll win.”

  They kept talking as they parted, getting farther away from each other. Finally they would blow kisses and go their separate ways.

  Everything, it now seemed, was becoming more exciting in Richie’s life. Kissing and feeling-up Linda. Winning fights. And learning more all the time about his father. Tomorrow Mack had promised to tell him everything he knew about Ralph Capone ordering Slim killed, and about a woman named Avellina Gela who had known Slim.

  Richie was certain the knowledge would bring him closer to his long lost father.

  14

  Their Sunday afternoon at Riverview Amusement Park was, for Slim and Ava, like showering their minds and hearts with rays of sunshine, cleansing them of their troubles and warming them to life again. They had fun—something neither had experienced for a long time.

  Ava already knew of Slim’s problems; now, on the long streetcar ride out Western Avenue, she shared hers with him.

  “I’m like a prisoner in that house,” she said. “Mamma Teresa won’t let me date because she says the American boys will take advantage of me. And she doesn’t approve of the Italians that Ralph and Mafalda bring home from time to time for me to meet; she says she doesn’t want me getting involved with men in the rackets, she wants me to wait for a respectable man to come along. How she ever expects me to meet anybody respectable, I’ll never know.”

  Ava put a hand on Slim’s arm. “Please don’t misunderstand what I’m saying. I love Mamma Teresa more than anybody in the world since my own mother died. But sometimes she doesn’t understand anyone’s position but her own. I’m like a daughter to her; she wants to protect me from marrying anyone associated with Al, like Mafalda did, and like Rose, her older daughter, did. She’s done so much for me all my life—sent money to Naples for me to attend a private school and learn to speak English, paid for me to be treated in a hospital in Rome when I got smallpox, bought two of everything for Mafalda so she could send me clothes. She was doing these things years ago, when her own family was growing up, back in Brooklyn, when she had to manage on what my late uncle, Gabriel, earned as a barber, and what she could make as a seamstress working at home. I owe her more than I’ll ever be able to repay. But sometimes it’s very hard to have someone so totally in control of your life.”