by Clark Howard
When he got back an hour later than she thought he should from his drugstore route, Chloe would be livid. “Where have you been?” she would screech, already grabbing at his pockets for the bottles. He always had an excuse.
“The stores were crowded and I couldn’t get waited on.” Or, “Some nigger kids chased me and I had to hide.” Or, “I lost my streetcar fare and had to walk back.”
His tardiness was premeditated and methodical. On Lake Street he lingered to talk to Vernie, who was nearly always around. On other days, Richie dawdled in the white neighborhoods, looking in secondhand stores, junk shops, variety stores along lower Madison Street, prowling amongst the carts and makeshift counters of street vendors on Maxwell Street, wandering along derelict-ridden Halsted Street, roaming at will, meandering, knowing his mother was chewing her nails waiting for him.
One day in his roving, Richie came across a double storefront building with lettering on the window which read: CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY—DAMEN AVE. BRANCH. Venturing in, he was stopped as he walked past a desk.
“You’re not allowed in there,” said a woman at the desk. “That’s the adult section. The juvenile section”—she pointed with a date-stamper—“is over there.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Richie muttered, turning in the proper direction.
In the juvenile section, he walked up and down the aisles of the stacks, looking at but not touching the books. There was a peculiar smell about the place; it reminded Richie of a schoolroom smell: chalk dust, people, pencil shavings. It was also, somehow, a reassuring place, as if the bulk of all the books could protect one from harm.
At the end of one stack, the lady from the desk was standing there. “Are you looking for a special book?” she asked. She was a short, round lady with beautiful, perfectly formed lips that moved precisely with each word. “I’ll help you find it if you are,” she said.
“Are there books with stories in them?” Richie asked.
“Stories? You mean short stories?”
“I guess.” Except, he thought, the ones he had read in Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post hadn’t been all that short.
The librarian led him to another stack and with one finger touched in turn three shelves. “These are collections of short stories for twelve-to-fifteen year olds,” she said. “Do you have a library card?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Well, you can’t take books home without a library card. I’ll give you a form to have one of your parents sign and then we can issue you a card.”
“Can I read books here until I get a card?” he asked.
“Of course.”
After the librarian walked away, Richie carefully, logically, took the first book at the beginning of the first of the three shelves, and took it to a table where he saw other children reading. Opening the book, he started with the first story, which was about a circus visiting a small town. After reading only a little of it, Richie went on to the next one. It was the story of a young boy being taken on his first fishing trip by his father. After two pages, Richie turned to the third story, about a family who adopted a lost dog, and how each member wanted to give it a different name. None of the stories—or any of the nine that followed—were able to hold Richie’s interest. He did not finish even one of them, finally returning the book to the shelf, being extremely careful to put it back in exactly the same place, and then took another. And another after that. He could not bring himself to finish any of the stories in any of the books, finding them either too simple or too silly.
When he stopped at the desk for his library-card application, he asked the lady with the pretty lips, “Are there any books with stories by Ben Ames Williams?”
“Ben Ames Williams?” She looked at him in astonishment. “Where on earth did you get that name?”
“I read his stories in magazines. Him and Walter Noble Burns and Zane Grey and Borden Chase and—”
“Those authors,” the librarian said firmly, “are in the adult section. You are only allowed in the juvenile section. Here,” she handed him a printed form. “Have one of your parents fill this out and sign it. Then I’ll give you a library card. For the juvenile section.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Richie mumbled, taking the application.
When he got home, Chloe was seething. “For God’s sake, you’ve never taken this long! Where in the hell have you been?”
“It just took longer today,” Richie shrugged, “I don’t know why.” Working the wrapped bottles out of his pocket, he handed them to her one by one, and she clutched them to her body.
“Will you fill this out and sign it for me?” he asked, showing her the application. “I got it at school,” he lied, because he could not tell her he had stopped at the library.
“Richie, I don’t have time for that!” Chloe snapped. “If I don’t take my medicine, I’m going to have a fit. Go on out and play!”
Richie stared at his mother, suddenly realizing that she knew absolutely nothing about the life he led. Go out and play? He did not know what it was to play anymore—unless smashing rats with bricks could be called playing. He had not actually played since they’d moved from Warren Boulevard. What he mostly did now with Stan was prowl: the streets, the alleys, the shadowed places of the city, places where they could steal or spy, look, listen, learn: young animals observing the pack.
Without a word, Richie left the apartment and walked all the way back to Lake Street. It was getting dark now; he found Vernie with several other girls and three black teenage boys. One of the boys saw Richie coming. “What the fuck you doing on this street, ofay?” he challenged menacingly.
“Lea’ him alone, Roger Lee,” Vernie intervened, “he be a friend of mine.” She turned scathingly to Richie. “What the hell you doing over here at night, Richie? I swear, I don’t think you got good sense sometimes! What you want?”
Drawing her aside, Richie showed her, in the glow of a streetlight, his application for a library card. “Will you fill it out and sign my mother’s name to it?”
Vernie sighed impatiently, irritably. “You ain’t been nuf’in but trouble since the day I found you, boy. Come on in here.” She dragged him by one arm into a steamy little rib joint a few doors down and sat him at the counter. A dozen dark faces stared at him; Richie fixed his eyes on an open bottle with dried catsup crusted around its top and kept them there.
“Naomi, borrow me a pencil for a minute,” Vernie said to a waitress. When she got it, she sat down next to him and began to fill out the card. Moving his eyes to look, Richie saw with surprise that Vernie wrote with a fine, neat script every bit as nice as his mother’s.
“I never knew you could write that good,” he said. Vernie threw him a cutting glance.
“I ain’t iggernant, Richie, just po’,” she said. In five minutes she had the application form completed and signed and gave it back to him, slightly grease-spotted from the counter. “Come on,” she said, purposely enunciating, “I’ll escort you back to your decent neighborhood.”
“Shit, Vernie, my neighborhood ain’t no better than yours,” Richie defended. “We got the same rats and roaches and bedbugs and stinking garbage in the alleys that you got. We’re no different from you.”
Vernie, having recovered her patience, looked tolerantly at him and said, “Richie, Richie, Richie. You be got a lot to learn, boy.”
Richie went to the Damen Avenue branch library every afternoon. He came to know the librarian, Miss Cashman, by name, and she him. “Hello, Richie,” she greeted him each time he returned a thin volume of short stories from the juvenile section. “Did you enjoy these?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am, Miss Cashman,” he lied, with the most innocent expression he could register. He never read any of the stories in any of the books from the juvenile section; his only purpose in checking them out was to accustom Miss Cashman to seeing him on a regular basis, to have her familiar with his presence in the library, comfortable with him being around. That way it was easier for him to tak
e books that he was not supposed to take.
It had required only three visits to the library to convince Richie that the material in the juvenile section was not for him. The Saturday Evening Post, he was certain, would never have any of it between its covers. By now Richie was a devoted reader of the Post; although not selling it on the street anymore, he nevertheless continued to read the magazine any time he could steal one from a drugstore rack. He had now progressed from considering only the Westerns to reading all of the war stories, many of the mysteries, and even an occasional romance if he suspected it might have any sexually suggestive passages. But even with the Post’s weekly offerings, he was, with an ever intensifying desire to read, always longing for more. He was certain he could find it in the forbidden area of the library: the adult section.
Richie discovered it was easy enough to get over there; he only had to wait until Miss Cashman and her student aide were occupied, then move unobtrusively behind their backs from one area to the other. In the adult section, he found that the grown-ups paid no attention to him; they all seemed to be deeply engrossed in their own business—even the browsers seldom gave him a second glance. The problem that annoyed Richie was finding the books he wanted there, which were chiefly collections of the short stories he had come to love. Knowing nothing of the library’s card catalogue system or how it related to locating specific books in the network of stacks, he began to find his way around in the library exactly as he had in the city—by ranging and exploring.
The first books Richie found that suited him were a series of annuals containing a selection of dramatic plays for consecutive years. Discovering them, Richie was impressed at once by their length, which resembled that of short stories, and intrigued by both the set-in dialogue and the stage directions. It would be, he concluded after very quick scrutiny, like reading a movie. As was his inclination, he put back the book he had inspected and moved over several volumes to the earliest one the branch had in the series—the best plays of the year 1935. Slipping it under his coat, and holding in front of him a book from the juvenile section to conceal the bulge, Richie made his way to the counter near the door, where Miss Cashman’s high school aide was checking out books. Standing up close to the counter, again to conceal the bulge, he handed over the juvenile book and his new library card. When the book was properly checked out and handed back to him, Richie again held it in front of himself and headed for the door. As he left, Miss Cashman smiled at him from her desk, and waved. Richie smiled and waved back.
At home that night, while his mother lay in her usual twilight stupor, Richie devoured the book of plays. He found them surprisingly easy to read, and quicker to get through because, he figured out, they omitted all the description that a short story included. After an initial explanation of what the stage looked like, and introductions to each character, it was all voices and movement.
The first one he read, ironically, was a play called Dead End by Sidney Kingsley, about, among other things, a group of young boys living in a big city tenement. The camaraderie among the boys reminded Richie of his own friendship with Stan Klein; the tenement neighborhood described in the stage setting was not unlike Chicago’s lower West Side, and most of the characters in the story, with the exception of a rich young woman, were people with whom Richie could identify—people who might have lived right on his own block. He was amazed that anyone would have written about such a place and such people. This was clearly not the stuff of Saturday Evening Post short stories; they dealt with the Old West, with the war, and with Great Mysteries. Dead End was just about poor people in the city. Yet there was a magic to it that was somehow different from the enchantment he found in short stories. It was a troubling magic, much realer than that which took him to far-off places and helped him escape what and where he was.
Before finally falling asleep that night, Richie read Winterset by Maxwell Anderson, Waiting for Lefty by Clifford Odets, Night Must Fall by Emlyn Williams, and Bright Star by Phillip Barry. The rest of the plays he read the next day in school, managing to avoid the entire day’s assignments in his class.
Richie hid the book of plays along with the juvenile short stories in the hallway, so his mother would not take them away from him. She had previously made him leave his marbles, cowboy trading cards, comics, and other amusement paraphernalia at home when he went to pick up her medicine, on the theory that if he had nothing of that sort to distract him and with which to amuse himself, he would get to the drugstores and back without wasting time. Since moving to Adams Street and meeting Stan, Richie had all but abandoned such things as marbles and trading cards, but he was wary of letting Chloe see the books for fear she would make him leave them at home.
At home, he no longer had to change from school clothes to play clothes; he now had only one class of clothes—old and threadbare. All he did after school now was come home to get the notes, money, and instructions as to which drugstores to visit. Chloe never kept a list or file of the drugstores; on that subject she had a memory that permitted her to review at times up to thirty drugstores, recall exactly when Richie had been there last, and whether he had purchased a fifteen-cent or twenty-five-cent bottle of paregoric. She no longer patted down Richie’s pockets before he left to see if he had marbles or other playthings on his person; somehow the realization must have seeped into her mind that her son no longer possessed those boyish things which at one time had meant so much to him. If his abandonment of them gave her cause for concern or even curiosity, she never showed it. To her, Richie was now simply a net that she daily cast out into an unfriendly sea. The waiting every day for Richie to return was almost as bad for her as waiting all week for George to come on Saturdays with her other, equally demanding emotional nourishment.
After Richie discovered the library, he began hurrying on his daily errands in order to get to the library sooner. Although he had found a selection of books to steal—or, at least, borrow illegally—he still liked to prowl the adult section just to look. He had already figured out that books seemed to be kept in place by use of alphabetical letters and a numbering system; he just did not know yet exactly how it worked. But one thing he did know: he would learn.
At the library, Richie returned the book of the plays of 1935 the same way he had taken it: under his coat. And, continuing his logical approach, next took the volume containing plays of 1936. When he got it outside, he immediately checked the table of contents to see if there were another play by Sidney Kingsley. Disappointed, Richie guessed that maybe these people didn’t write a play every year. Looking back on younger days, he reflected that it would be like having your favorite cowboy star appear in every serial. But even without Sidney Kingsley, Richie carried tightly under his arm his latest illegally obtained prize—along, of course, with some dreadful volume from the goddamned juvenile section. Jesus!
You’d think, he mused in annoyance on his way home, that in America the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, a person could read what they wanted to read. Life, as Stan Klein often said, wasn’t even close to being fair.
After deciding not to stick a knife in George Zangara’s neck some night as he came down the dark stairs, Richie did make up his mind to avoid him as much as possible. George always arrived now early on Saturday afternoon, and he and Chloe stayed in the shabby little apartment for several hours. Richie was sure he knew what they were doing, but tried not to think about it. His drugstore errands on Saturdays and Sundays were always done in the mornings, so it was easy for him to be gone before George got there. Chloe and George always left the apartment between six and seven, at which time, if he was not doing anything with Stan, Richie went home and fixed himself something to eat. If he went prowling later with Stan—to steal money off newsstands or spy on the nurses at County Hospital—he sometimes returned to the apartment around ten or eleven, to eat again, or maybe just to lie on the frayed couch and listen to the radio. He always left just before midnight, because the bars, under wartime regulations, had to clos
e at midnight, and his mother and her boyfriend would be home a little while later. George usually stayed until sometime between two and three A.M., then went up to the Graymere Hotel on Homan Avenue where he and his friend Randy had a room. There was an understanding that Randy and Nell would use the hotel room; Nell had three kids and could not take Randy home. If Chloe had such reservations, her addiction annulled them.
When Richie had the money, he went over to West Madison Street to the all-night Haymarket Theater and stayed from midnight until around four, when he was sure George would be gone. When Stan learned Richie was doing that, he gave him his pocketknife. “Sit in a seat up against the wall,” he advised, “and keep this out wit’ the blade open. Anybody messes wit’ you, stick ’em in the arm wit’ it. Lots of queers hang out in the Haymarket.”
“What’s a queer?” Richie asked.
“A guy that likes to feel-up boys instead of girls. You know, a fairy.”
“Oh, yeah, a fairy,” Richie said, to cover his ignorance.
For the next few times he went to the Haymarket, Richie sat with the open knife as Stan had recommended. But he was never bothered by anyone, not once. It seemed to him that the only thing the adult patrons did at that hour was swig wine and snore.
It was at the Haymarket that Richie first saw John Garfield. The movie was called They Made Me a Criminal. In it, in addition to Garfield, were the Dead End Kids, the same group that had been gathered on the stage for Richie’s favorite play, and had subsequently gone on to act in movies. It both awed and excited Richie to actually see the youths who had been in Dead End on the stage. They, and Garfield, fit perfectly the image of youthful misfits in an uncaring world. Richie recognized something in all of them that fit Stan Klein, Louis, Ham, himself, and a dozen others. It struck him that perhaps Sidney Kingsley had written the movie, but later when he read the poster outside the theater, he saw that Kingsley had not. Nevertheless, when Richie trudged home through the dark city streets at four o’clock that morning, he had the seed of a new hero inside him. Buck Jones was dead; long live John Garfield.
