Hard City

by Clark Howard

  “How’s come you just got one?”

  “I didn’t want one,” Richie said. “I ate a big breakfast.” It was a lie. He had eaten four slices of dry toast and washed it down with water. His mother had not bought any groceries since they had moved three days earlier; the bread he had toasted, which they had brought with them, was nearly a week old.

  Eating the apple, Stan led Richie to the alley behind their block, to a building near the other corner. Near the foundation of a garage that faced the alley, Stan showed Richie several dark holes leading into the ground under the garage. “Rat holes,” he said. With a pocketknife, Stan peeled the raw potatoes, tossed the potatoes themselves into a garbage can, and spread the peels on the ground a foot or so from the rat holes. “Okay, c’mon.” He hit Richie on the arm and hurried to a row of ashcans near the coal chute of an adjoining tenement. From behind one can he pulled out half a dozen red bricks, giving three to Richie. “Follow me,” he said. “Hurry up.”

  They went up the outside rear stairs of the building to a second-floor back porch. “Everybody in this building works,” Stan said, “so nobody’s around to bother us. The guys in the neighborhood use this porch for everything—to smoke, read comic books we swipe, anything we wanna do. Right here’s where we kill rats.”

  Standing at the rail, they looked down at a forty-five-degree angle at the garage foundation and the potato peelings. Following Stan’s example, Richie put two bricks on the floor and the third on top of the railing.

  “I’ll go first,” Stan said, “to show you how it’s done.”

  They waited quietly and patiently, bricks in hand. In less than five minutes the first rat stuck its head out of the hole and looked around. Stan’s fingers tightened on his brick, but he otherwise made no move at all that might frighten the rodent. Several seconds went by, then the rat came halfway out of the hole and looked around. Glancing at Richie, Stan nodded and winked. A few more seconds and the rat was all the way out, scurrying over to the pungent-smelling potato peels, sinking its ferret teeth into the still moist skin.

  Stan’s brick flew through the air with uncanny accuracy. Just as the rat was turning to take its food back to the hole, the brick smashed it against the alley pavement, spreading it into a blotch of gore and dirty hair.

  Richie winced. Stan grinned.

  “That’s rat-killing. Fun, huh? I’ll go down and get rid of the mess, an’ you can try your luck with the next one.”

  “Will another one come out?” Richie asked in amazement.

  “Before you know it,” Stan assured him. “Rats are the dumbest goddamned things in the world. You’ll see.”

  As Richie watched, Stan used a garbage can lid to scrape away the mess of his victim. Then he hurried back up to the porch. “Keep your brick ready,” he advised, “an don’t t’row until the rat gets all the way out to the peel and gets it in his mouth. Then aim for a spot halfway between the peel and the hole. T’row fast and t’row hard.”

  “Right,” Richie said, wetting his lips. Hefting the brick as he had seen Stan do, he then fell into a near-motionless stance, only his chest moving slightly with each breath, his eyes blinking occasionally. He hoped to God he hit the rat so he wouldn’t look dumb to Stan.

  It took only about three minutes for another rat face to appear in the same hole. Seconds later, it was scurrying over to the peelings, its dark, hairy body dirty and disgusting, its long, thin tail slimy and slick with the filth of its black, putrid world. Richie could see the repugnant mouth open, the ugly yellow teeth sink into the irresistible potato peel. Around the brick, he felt his fingers and palm become moist. Jaw set, lips tight, he let fly the brick.

  It smashed the rat to pulp.

  “Bullseye!” said Stan.

  He and Richie looked at each other and grinned.

  In that moment they became buddies.

  Stanley Klein was a restless kid. The only time he stayed anywhere longer than an hour was in school or at a movie. “In this city it don’t pay to get caught sitting still,” he philosophized. “It’s safer when you keep moving. ‘Member that, Richie.”

  Richie studied his new friend like a lesson in survival, which in a way he was. At Brown Elementary, where they were both in fifth grade, Stan had developed a way of avoiding fights—simply by letting it be known that he would fight—anybody, anyplace. When he first came to Brown, he had four fights in three days: all-out, blood-letting, punching and kicking, no-quarter-given fights. Two with white kids, two with colored kids. One fight had actually been in a classroom, which the two combatants half wrecked. Stan lost three of the four fights and was expelled for the fourth, the classroom brawl, but in each encounter he inflicted more than moderate damage on his opponent, all the while yelling, “Come on, beat my ass! Whip me good! But you’re gonna take some licks too, cocksucker! Come on!”

  When Stan was allowed to return to school after his expulsion, nobody—no matter how big or how tough—bothered him anymore. The black kids referred to him as a “crazy motherfucker, ain’t got sense enough to take a licking.” White kids simply warned, “Don’t fuck with him, he’s nuts; he’ll jump your ass in the fucking classroom and get you t’rowed outta school.”

  For Richie, being friends with Stan at Brown Elementary was the same as having Ham as a protector at Grant, except that he did not have to pay Stan. Being Stan’s buddy and constant companion was enough; where Stan went and what Stan did, Richie went and did also, and for the first time in his life he enjoyed immunity from bullying and ridicule. Nobody fucked with him as long as he was with Stan. Richie vowed to himself that if Stan ever did have to fight anyone, for whatever reason, Richie would fight right along beside him. He was very grateful, however, that such an occasion never materialized. Stan’s reputation always precluded it.

  Stan, like Richie, had no father; he lived with his mother and fifteen-year-old sister. His mother worked nights as a bar maid in a tavern on Racine Avenue.

  Richie was amazed at the things Stan could do. He had ways of getting in without paying at half the movie houses on the West Side, and even some of the big vaudeville theaters in the Loop. He thought nothing of taking a streetcar downtown and sneaking into the majestic, ornate Oriental, or the stately State-Lake, or the rich, velvety Woods. Stan took Richie to see stage shows with performances by Danny Kaye, Olsen and Johnson, Carmen Miranda, Harry James and his Orchestra, and numerous others who played the big stage show houses. The boys also saw all the new first-run war movies: A Yank on the Burma Road, Remember Pearl Harbor, Wake Island, Manila Calling, Commandos Strike at Dawn, and Stand By for Action. In the latter, Richie watched former sissy star Robert Taylor in still another manly role as a naval officer who rescues a boatload of mothers and babies from a torpedoed ship. Richie still mourned that Dixie Cup lid!

  The only thing Richie did without Stan in the early days of their friendship was to go off by himself one afternoon and ride a streetcar out to the Kedzie Annex theater to see Dawn on the Great Divide, the last picture Buck Jones made. Sitting through it the first time, Richie had watery eyes; he sat through it a second time after he had composed himself. It was a fine movie, he thought, one of Buck’s best, with the final shootout between Buck and an actor named Roy Barcroft, probably the best bad guy in the movies. Richie was glad that Buck’s last movie gunfight had been against Barcroft and that, as always, Buck had given the bad guy an edge by letting him draw first.

  After the second show, when he left the Kedzie Annex, Richie stood for several moments on the corner, looking over at the Senate Theater on the opposite corner, where he had seen Buck in person that memorable night three months earlier. Tears again came to his eyes as he raised his hand in a kid’s salute, said, “So long, Buck,” to himself, and started walking home because he had no streetcar fare.

  Everything else Richie did, he did with Stan. Besides movies and stage shows, and rat-killing, Stan introduced him to other forms of entertainment. In a maze of alleys in and around the Cook County Hospit
al complex on lower Harrison Street, Stan showed him a ground-level window, hidden behind a large iron garbage dumpster, through which they could look down into a locker room and watch nurses showering and changing in and out of their starched white uniforms. The first time they looked through the window together, there was a blonde woman with enormous breasts who took a long, leisurely shower in the open shower room and then sat on a bench and slowly rubbed lotion all over her body. While they were watching, Richie noticed Stan, in a shadowy crouch, making an odd movement.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Jacking off.” Stan paused and looked at Richie. “Ain’t you never done it?”

  Richie shrugged, embarrassed. “No.”

  “Your dick’s hard, ain’t it?”

  Swallowing, Richie said, “Yeah.”

  “Take it out,” Stan instructed. Unbuttoning his fly, Richie released his erection. “Okay, now go like this with your hand,” Stan said, showing him how.

  Looking at the blonde from behind the garbage dumpster, Richie masturbated for the first time.

  When Chloe sent him back to the black drugstores on Lake Street, Richie saw Vernie again. She did not appear surprised to see him.

  “Hey, Richie,” she greeted him nonchalantly. “You mamma hooked again, I guess.”

  “Huh?” said Richie, not understanding.

  Getting off a car fender where she had been sitting talking to another girl, Vernie said, “Come on, I walk wit’cha.”

  Filled out even more now, at fifteen Vernie walked with a smooth strut that was no longer practiced but now natural and confident. Her skirt was the new wartime length, three inches above the knees; she wore no stockings, and her sandals were flat-heeled, making her legs look round and strong. A black brassiere was outlined under her white blouse. In her waistband, Richie saw the handle of her straight razor.

  “Is Alonzo still around?” Richie asked as they walked.

  “No, ‘Lonzo’s fam’ly moved to the South Side someplace,” Vernie said. “But they be somebody jus’ like him around. They always be somebody think they a badass.”

  “We moved too,” Richie told her. “Down on Adams near Damen.”

  “Shit, we prac’tly neighbors, Richie,” she said. As they walked, Vernie glanced several times at Richie, studying him. Finally she asked, “You know any white boys might wanna come over here to Lake Street for a good time?”

  “What do you mean?” Richie had a pretty good idea what she meant, but he wanted to make sure.

  “A good time like boys and girls has together,” Vernie elaborated. “Like when they go in the dark doorways together. You know.”

  “Oh, yeah. Sure.”

  “If you knows any, you send ’em around, hear? Tell ’em come to the corner of Lake and Hoyne after it get dark.”

  “How old do they have to be?” Richie inquired. He was wondering how Vernie would look with her clothes off.

  “Older than you, tha’s for sure,” she squelched his fantasy. “Fo’teen, at least. And they gots to have fifty cents. Understand?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ever’ one you send ‘round, I give you a nickel. And I’ll keep these niggers around here off your ass when you come to get dope for yo’ mamma.”

  Richie had never heard his mother’s medicine referred to as “dope” before. When he saw Stan that night he asked what ‘“dope” meant.

  “It just means dope,” Stan replied, shrugging. “It’s like whiskey, I t’ink, only harder to get.”

  “Is it like medicine?”

  “I guess,” Stan allowed, shrugging again. “It makes people feel good, is why they take it. That’s kinda like medicine, ain’t it?”

  “Sure,” Richie replied. He spoke the word quietly, reflectively, as a shroud of understanding slowly slipped over his young mind. Dope. The word itself had an ominous ring to it, like “death.” It sounded evil. Vernie had mentioned his mother being “hooked.” That too prompted ugly images. If it was medicine she was sending him after, why did he have to go to so many places to get it; why couldn’t he get it all at one place?

  One afternoon, as Chloe was preparing to send him on his errands, Richie asked her about it. “Why do they call the stuff you take dope?”

  “Who calls it dope?” Chloe asked.

  “A girl over on Lake Street called it dope.”

  “A girl? What girl?” His mother’s voice grew impatient.

  “A girl that walks with me sometimes.”

  “A nigger girl?” Chloe asked contemptuously.

  “Yeah.”

  Chloe pointed a threatening finger at him. “You keep away from these city nigger girls, young man, you hear me? You can catch bad things just by standing close to city nigger girls and breathing the same air. Now for your information, my medicine is not dope. If it was dope, you couldn’t buy it in the drugstore. So you tell this girl, whoever she is, that your mother says she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Then you stay away from her. I mean it.”

  Richie felt like telling his mother that had it not been for Vernie, half the time he would not even get to the Lake Street drugstores with her money. Alonzo, now gone, had been replaced by half a dozen other young colored thugs even worse than him, and the colored ghetto, shoulder to shoulder with Richie’s white slum, was becoming more dangerous with each day that passed, especially for whites who ventured into it. Many companies were hiring colored delivery men now because white men would not drive a ghetto route. But Richie knew that it would do no good to tell Chloe those things; in the afternoons when she was becoming desperate for her paregoric, she would have sent him into a snake pit to get it.

  Stan was always waiting when Richie got home from his drugstore errands. He would not go with Richie because he had other things to do, profitable activities in which he engaged every day: stealing soda pop bottles from the rear of stores and returning them to other stores for the two-cent deposit; filching coins from unattended newsstands; shoplifting dime store merchandise that he could peddle on the street. Stan had a repertoire of ways to acquire money; when Richie finished his errands early and was able to find him along Madison Street, Stan introduced Richie to the various methods he employed. Within a month of moving to Adams Street, Richie had become a skilled street thief.

  One night Richie came home from prowling the streets with Stan and then sneaking into the Elmo Theater to see a movie. When he let himself into the dingy flat, he found his mother sitting on the sofa with a dark, handsome man wearing an Air Corps uniform.

  “Hi, sugar,” his mother said with forced brightness, immediately nervous. “This is George, a new friend of mine. He’s in the Air Corps, isn’t that exciting? George, this is my little boy, Richie.”

  “Hello, Richie,” the dark man said with a dazzling smile. He had curly black hair, a thin black moustache, and the most perfect white teeth Richie had ever seen. His skin was the color of wet sand.

  “Well, come shake hands like a big boy, sugar,” his mother prompted. Richie sulked over and reluctantly offered his hand. “Hi,” he said, barely audible.

  “Now go on and take your bath, sugar, it’s way past your bedtime. What have I told you about staying out so late on school nights? I swear, George, the older they get, the harder it is to make them mind. Go on and take your bath now.”

  When he came back into the room after his bath, George was gone. “Who’s he?” Richie asked.

  “I told you, he’s a new friend. Just a friend, that’s all. So don’t go pulling one of your pouts on me.”

  “Is he a nigger?” Richie asked bluntly.

  “He most certainly is not!” Chloe replied indignantly. “Say, where do you get off asking a thing like that? I ought to slap your fresh mouth, young man.”

  “He’s a funny color,” Richie defended.

  “George happens to be a Spaniard,” Chloe said loftily.

  “What’s that?’

  “Well, it’s—it’s like Mexican, only much better. It’s
what people are called when they’re from Spain.”

  “Is he from Spain?”

  “Well, no,” Chloe admitted. “Actually, he’s from Texas. But he’s Spanish, all the same.”

  “Is he going to be coming around a lot?” Richie wanted to know.

  “Well, he might!” Chloe replied, her tone becoming indignant again. “Anyway, what if he does? There’s nothing wrong with that, is there? I told you, he’s just a friend. Somebody to talk to, maybe go to a tavern and listen to a jukebox with once in a while.”

  “What about Johnny?”

  “Well, what about hirn?” she demanded. “Is it going to hurt him if I go sit and listen to some music with somebody? I swear, Richie, you’re worse than a little old woman sometimes!” Seeing that Richie was upset at meeting George, Chloe abruptly dropped her indignation defense and pulled him over to the sofa next to her. “Listen, sugar, everything’s all right,” she assured, putting an arm around him. “I’m not going to do anything to mess things up with Johnny. George is just somebody to talk to, to keep me from getting so lonesome. It’s all right, honest.” She cupped his chin in her palm. “You’re not going to be mad at me, are you, sugar?”

  “I don’t know,” Richie said, shrugging.

  “Come on now,” she urged, squeezing his cheeks. “Say you’re not mad at me.”

  “All right.”

  “All right, what?”

  “All right, I’m not mad at you.”

  Chloe’s face, for just a second, turned sad. “Thanks, sugar,” she said quietly. Then she gave him one of her dazzling smiles. “Listen, I’ve got an idea! Why don’t we open a couple of Coca-Colas and listen to Lux Radio Theater together? They’ve got ‘Stagecoach’ on tonight with John Wayne. Want to?”

  “Yeah, swell!” Richie beamed.

  While the radio warmed up, Chloe got the soda pop, then they sat leaning their shoulders together and listened to Cecil B. DeMille’s grandfatherly voice say, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Lux Radio Theater . . . .”