Hard City

by Clark Howard

  While Freddie went out on the field crew every afternoon to hoe weeds, and Joey reported to the laundry building to operate a hand-cranked wringer, Richie rode the big garbage truck that came through the gate at one-thirty to make its way around the institution to collect all kitchen waste and shop trash. He hung on to the rear of the truckbed with a black kid, nicknamed Jazz because he was always jiving and shucking. At every stop, they hopped off, hoisted the big metal drums of garbage, and emptied them into the truckbed. The driver, a St. Charles townsman who contracted the work, shouted the same thing to them at every stop.

  “Come on, you punks, snap it up! Get the lead out! I ain’t got all day for this job!”

  Richie, following the example set by Jazz, never varied his speed faster or slower. As Jazz told him the first day, “You work faster on Monday, he gon’ want you to work even faster on Tuesday. Don’ give the man nothin’ you don’ have to give him. He gonna bitch about yo’ work no matter what.”

  Jazz was right. At the end of every run, when the truck dropped them back at Polk Cottage, Mr. McKey would ask the driver how the two had performed. The driver always gave a variation of the same reply.

  “Slow, real slow. I could get outta here a half hour earlier if they was to work faster. They’re just too damn lazy to do it. I can see why they’re in here.”

  Every day, McKey would give each of them a demerit.

  Just working on the garbage truck got Richie and Jazz enough demerits to qualify for punishment three times a month.

  Mornings at Charleytown were given over to school. Based on a boy’s age, without regard to prior education, he was placed in a classroom which theoretically was subdivided into three levels of ability, with the teacher, called an “instructor,” supposed to impart knowledge according to the capacity of each group. In actuality, the classrooms were not apportioned in any way; the boys sat where they felt like sitting, usually unchallenged. Worn textbooks of one subject or another were distributed to all, with instructions to read any one of three sections. No controls monitored the reading. When a given time was up, the instructor asked questions about the assigned sections, receiving infrequent and almost unanimously incorrect answers. The instructor then told the class what the correct answer was. The class was never retested.

  “This school is stupid,” Richie said after his third day. “It’s a waste of time.”

  “A kid tol’ me these teachers ain’t really teachers,” Freddie confided. “Tha’s why they’re called instructors. They’re cheaper than real teachers.”

  Jesus, Richie thought. Longingly he recalled Miss White and how she usually managed to make even the slowest pupil in her class at least a little smarter. She worked at being a teacher, Richie realized. But these Charleytown instructors did not even try; they repeated the same ineffective, unsuccessful routine day after day.

  Thinking of Miss White made Richie think of Linda. She was on his mind a lot, especially at night when he was trying to go to sleep with an annoying erection demanding attention. He remembered with bittersweet melancholy her warm breath when they kissed, her growing young breasts, the soft inside of her thighs. When Richie gave in to his nighttime urges, his deep craving, and slipped into the bathroom to relieve himself, it was not Linda, however, but Frances that he thought of while doing it. He thought of her body, anyway; he tried not to think of her face, because of the way he had seen it last. Frequently his lustful image as he masturbated in the dark toilet stall was without features. But it was always the body of Frances; the carnal memory when he climaxed was a faceless Frances.

  Besides school, another deficiency Richie found at Charleytown was the library. It was, from a point of view stemming from his own reading skills, the most inadequate he had ever seen—worse even than the juvenile section of the Damen Avenue branch library back in Chicago. The vast majority of the books at Charleytown—which were shelved in a small, single room in the educational building—were for the lowest age level sent to the training school, which was twelve. When Richie inquired of one of the instructors, who took turns minding the room in the afternoons, why there were no books for older boys, he was told, “You got me there, kid. I’ve only been here about a year. But it’s probably because they figured that most kids being sent to a place like this probably didn’t read books anyhow.”

  The instructor, a man about thirty named Mr. Simms, had his feet propped up on the desk and was holding a paperback edition of Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis. Eyeing the book, Richie asked on impulse, “Mr. Simms, could I have that paperback when you’re finished with it?”

  Mr. Simms smiled tolerantly. “You wouldn’t understand it,” he said. “It’s an adult book.”

  “I’ve read adult books,” Richie told him. “I’ve read John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos, Thornton Wilder, John O’Hara, F. Scott Fitzgerald—”

  “Where’d you read books by them?” the instructor asked in amazement.

  Richie decided to see whether the truth would get him anywhere. “I used to sneak them out of the adult section of the library, then sneak them back in when I finished reading them.”

  Simms stared at him for a long moment, then shook his head in wonder. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “Okay, sure, you can have it. But if you get caught with it, don’t say you got it from me. I’ll call you a liar if you do.”

  “I don’t rat on people,” Richie said in John Garfield style.

  A week later he had the copy of Babbitt.

  Richie, Freddie, and Joey had been approached their first day in Polk Cottage by a strikingly handsome, superbly built black youth of sixteen who was nicknamed “Lightning.”

  “They call me that because my hands are so fast,” he advised them with a dazzling smile. “I’m so fast I can catch flies in the air. I can change hands when I’m jacking off without missing a stroke. I can hit you in the face before you can blink.” His smile disappeared. “Let’s talk business. Old Man McKey runs this cottage from the outside, but I run it from the inside. I settle all arguments, make sure everybody shares in anything that gets smuggled in—candy, smokes, reefers, eight-pagers, fuck pictures—and I assign cleaning jobs on Saturday mornings when we blitz the cottage. For this I get two bits of every dollar allowance you get from home, or half of every food package your folks bring in on visiting day. Now then,” he looked at Freddie, the biggest, “how much allowance you expect to get?”

  “Not a dime, man,” Freddie told him. “The only thing my old man or my old lady ever gave me was a beatin’. I won’t be getting no food packages neither.”

  “Me either,” said Richie. “No allowance, no packages, no visitors.”

  Lightning turned to Joey. “You?”

  “Prob’ly salami and stuff when my ma visits,” he said. “She always brung stuff to my brother when he was here. But they ain’t got the dough to give me none.”

  Lightning glowered. “If you guys are bullshitting me, I’ll whip your asses all over this fucking cottage.”

  “We ain’t bullshitting you,” Freddie said evenly. “And we ain’t gonna take no ass-kicking, unless you figure you can handle all three of us at once, ’cause we made a deal to stick together.”

  “You can’t stick together all the time,” Lightning pointed out.

  “You can’t stay awake all the time either,” Freddie countered. “No matter how tough you are, you gotta sleep sometime.”

  “Look,” Richie cut in, “we’d pay you if we could. But we can’t. So what the fuck’s the sense in fighting about it? When the fight’s over, we’ll all be right back where we started at.”

  “Yeah, but the others in the cottage would know I was still in charge,” Lightning asserted.

  “They can know it anyway,” Richie said. “Just tell them we’re paying you; we’ll go along with the story. It’ll save trouble all around.” He was remembering the confrontation between Vernie and Alonzo on the el platform. Vernie had let Alonzo save face in that dispute and a fight had been avoided. Richie had the
distinct feeling that Lightning did not want a fight any more than Alonzo had.

  Lightning thought over Richie’s proposal and finally agreed to it. Like Alonzo, however, he had to back away with bravado. “Okay, we’ll do it that way. But if any of you squeal about it, I’m gonna kick the shit out of all of you, Got that?”

  “We got it,” said Freddie. “Thanks for the welcome.” After Lightning left, Freddie looked curiously at Richie. “Would you really pay him if you was getting an allowance?”

  “Fuck no,” Richie declared. Those days were gone forever. “He’d have to kill me first.”

  Freddie grinned. “That’s what I thought.”

  “Do I have to share my food package with him?” Joey asked.

  “Nope,” Freddie said, draping an arm around the smaller boy’s shoulders, “only with Richie and me.”

  Punishment in Polk Cottage was administered every night at seven-thirty. Any boy who had accumulated ten demerits was called into the anteroom by Mr. McKey, who returned from his home in town after supper each evening to supervise personally the punishment period. Later, when punishment was over and all the boys locked in the dormitory, McKey went home again, turning the cottage over to a night orderly until his return the next morning.

  There was hardly a boy in Polk Cottage who did not receive demerits for failing to answer questions McKey randomly asked, without warning, about items he had put on the bulletin board regarding his son Gordie. Not only sports items: GORDIE MCKEY THROWS WINNING PASS; GORDIE MCKEY LEADS VARSITY TO BASKETBALL TOURNAMENT, GORDIE MCKEY SETS NEW STATE RECORD FOR 100-YARD DASH, but items from a Boy Scout newsletter: GORDIE MCKEY EARNS 15TH MERIT BADGE; a Presbyterian Church bulletin: GORDIE MCKEY SELECTED AS VACATION BIBLE SCHOOL TEACHER FOR YOUNGER CHILDREN; a high school newspaper: GORDIE MCKEY NEW R.O.T.C. LIEUTENANT; GORDIE MCKEY ELECTED SOPHOMORE CLASS PRESIDENT; and a National Honor Society magazine: GORDIE MCKEY EARNS PERFECT SCHOLASTIC RECORD FOR THIRD STRAIGHT YEAR.

  It was not that the boys in Polk Cottage failed to read everything that McKey tacked up; it was simply that they were unable to understand most of it, could not individually identify with it, therefore were unable to remember it. Most of them knew nothing of the Boy Scouts, R.O.T.C, or the National Honor Society. The news they read of All-American boy Gordie McKey was just a lot of words that did not register. That was why the house father caught them so often.

  “You there, Walsh,” he would challenge, “name the Softball team that my boy Gordie pitched a shutout against last week.”

  Freddie would think and then shrug. “I can’t remember, Mr. McKey, sir.”

  Out would come the spiral notebook. “That’s a demerit, Walsh.”

  And: “You, Lupo. When my boy Gordie won the high school debating contest, what subject did he debate?”

  Joey’s expression would twist into a squinting frown. “What does ‘subject’ mean, Mr. McKey?”

  “It means another demerit for you, Lupo.”

  Or: “You”—pointing to Richie—“what organization wrote about my boy Gordie’s perfect grade average?”

  Richie always tried to answer. “The National Grade Society?”

  “Close, but not close enough. One demerit. Pay more attention to what you read next time.”

  Punishment varied. Push-ups were the most common for the younger kids. Those a little older were made to hold their arms straight out in front of them, palms down, with a broomstick laid across the backs of their hands. Within minutes it made them feel as if their arms were being torn out of the sockets and their necks were going to burst.

  There was also the Spot, a white circle on the floor, near the wall, on which a boy had to stand perfectly still, looking at a white line on the wall, for several hours at a time.

  And there was Old Faithful—Mr. McKey’s leather razor strap. Old Faithful was optional. Instead of push-ups, the broomstick, or the Spot, McKey occasionally let a boy choose a predetermined number of licks with the strap. The licks had to be taken in undershorts, without trousers, while leaning over a straight chair. The punishment reminded Richie of the foster home run by the Hubbards.

  The worst punishment by far was the fire hose. The big canvas hose hung rolled in a wooden box on the wall of the anteroom, connected to a large spigot next to the box. Long enough to stretch far into the dormitory, it could also stretch down a short flight of stairs to the basement of the cottage. The basement was empty except for an oil furnace that heated the cottage in winter. There was a brick wall near the bottom of the stairs. Mr. McKey had come up with the idea of making the boys with the most demerits each month line up naked in front of that wall, and he would drag the fire hose down the stairs, have the night orderly turn on the faucet, and blast them with the powerful spray. It was like being beaten with wet towels.

  Freddie Walsh got the fire hose every month. Richie got it about half the time. Joey only got it once in a while; unlike Freddie and Richie, he rarely received work demerits because the laundry superintendent did not believe in the demerit system. Freddie’s field crew supervisor, like Richie’s garbage truck driver, routinely reported half a dozen boys a day for demerits. Freddie, because of his attitude, was usually among them.

  The first time Richie and Freddie were sent down for fire hose punishment, they had been advised by others who had undergone it to start crying and pleading as soon as the water hit. “The quicker you start bawling and begging,” they were told, “the quicker the old bastard’ll send you back upstairs.”

  “Fuck him,” Freddie said defiantly, “I ain’t gonna crawl for the old son of a bitch.”

  “Me either,” Richie vowed. “I don’t beg. Fuck him.”

  When they got downstairs and stood naked in front of the wall with four other boys, they continued their defiance even as Mr. McKey descended the stairs with the hose. When he had the water turned on and opened it up on them, Richie and Freddie felt themselves driven back against the rough wall by the force of the blast. Immediately they doubled up in protective crouches on the floor. Their faces contorted in pain, they heard the others begin to cry and plead. McKey moved the nozzle back and forth like a tripod-mounted machine gun, lacing them as they slipped, twisted, and turned trying to find a way to escape. But there was only one way—and they knew it.

  One by one, as they groveled and appealed, beseeching the house father to let them go, he did, shouting their names as he released them. Richie and Freddie held on until last, but finally Richie could take the brutal stream no longer and yelled, “Lemme—out—please—lemme—out!”

  McKey let Richie go, and kept blasting Freddie until he too capitulated.

  “Tough guys, eh?” McKey taunted as they stumbled pitifully back upstairs.

  They hated McKey even more after that, because he had made them beg for mercy.

  Richie’s days in Charleytown flowed into weeks, then months. His life on the outside had not been easy, but at least, as he remembered it now, he had never had to endure the terrible malaise that grew out of his existence in the reformatory. The tedium of his everyday routine was numbing. Attending the pathetic excuse for a school was daily torture; even when he tried to learn, it was futile: the blatant lack of interest in the other boys, coupled with the incompetence and indifference of the instructors, created an atmosphere in which Richie found learning impossible.

  Afternoons on the garbage truck with Jazz were, for a time, a welcome relief, but with the advent of winter even that became trying. The state issued only wool gloves, not leather, and the metal coldness of the truck and the garbage cans penetrated the wool at once, leaving the fingers of the two boys painfully frigid. It took them longer on cold days to empty the icy cans, with their sometimes semi-frozen contents, making the driver complain all the more to McKey, whose pencil was always ready to give extra demerits. Richie and Jazz grew to hate the driver so intensely that they wished he would wreck his truck some day and be trapped inside to burn alive.

  “If he be on fire burning, I wouldn’t pi
ss on him,” Jazz swore.

  “Me either,” Richie concurred. “I wouldn’t spit on the son of a bitch.”

  “Just let the motherfucker fry.”

  “To a fucking crisp.”

  Nights in the dorm weren’t much better. Once Richie and Freddie tired of playing checkers or tossing bean bags—which Joey seemed to enjoy without limitation—there was nothing left to do except talk. The subject matter was nearly always the outside: what they did, who they knew, where they went—litanies of life on the street. Compared to what they had both been used to, Charleytown, as far as creature comforts were concerned, was not that bad. The food was adequate and often tasty; Richie had already gained eight pounds. The bunks were better than some he had slept on, and the cottage was well-heated during the bitter Illinois plains winter. And Richie was able to steal a few precious minutes of reading each day from paperbacks Mr. Simms passed to him; for part of that winter he devoured, although slowly, Random Harvest by James Hilton.

  It was the devastating boredom that Richie could not take. He felt as if his mind were wasting away, his brain decomposing by the ounce. A dreaded thought was that in two or three more years, he would be sitting every night like Joey, contentedly playing checkers, the ultimate mental challenge in his life just to win the next game. The prospect was frightening.