Young and Violent (5 page)

Mr. Gonzalves sits smiling wistfully to himself for a moment, nodding his head up and down, his hands clasped together peacefully. “Yes, yes,” he says. “Yes, yes.”

His wife consoles him. “Who knows what would be now if the market had never dropped on sugar? Who knows what would be, George?”

“What would be? I would be big! A big man! Maybe head supervisor; maybe manager, even. Yes, manager! A manager!”

“Sure, Papa. Sure,” Gober says.

“And no one would look down their nose. I would know my business. I would be in my business all my life and they would need me to tell them what to do, and they would not even let me retire, they would need me so. Not like here. ‘Lie, George,’ someone tells me yesterday when I go to the project to see for a job, ‘Sixty is too old. They don’t want a heart case.’ I have to lie to them, who are no better then me. To them, who say, ‘Talk more slowly. I don’t understand you.’ They say that to me like I’m a bug they will squash next … You listen to me, Rigoberto, son of my heart, learn a trade. It’s the only way you will be somebody!”

“Okay, Papa. All right. Okay.”

“I wished maybe Riggie would be a doctor or something professional. He goes to school, George. We never did. We don’t know things except what we lived, but Riggie reads from books in school, he talks English. He talks two languages, our Riggie. Two! Fluently! Riggie, be a smart boy. Don’t be dumb like Mama and Papa. It’s a new world, Riggie. It’s a world that belongs to the people who know things. Don’t be like us. Finish school. You are smart in school. You flunked only one subject last term. Do you know how many your papa and me could pass?”

Mr. Gonzalves says, “It took more than brains at the
refineria.
A man had to be a big man inside of him, a big man to supervise. A man had to say, ‘Listen, I’m boss! You do what I tell you!’ He had to say it so they believed him. That’s not in the books!”

Mrs. Gonzalves puts her great arms around her small-boned, short, mustached husband, drawing him to her. She slips a hand under the neck of his worn cotton nightgown, and pats his chest playfully. “You were one big cheese, weren’t you, baby!” she says proudly. “I remember when I met you and listened to you talking — me, a girl of fifteen, and you in your thirties — and I thought, He’s so smart! He ought to be God, or president! And I still say so!”

“Yah! Yah! Yah!” Gober’s father laughs, and he ducks his head down, burying it in the immense folds of flesh at his wife’s bosom.

“Don’t bite!” she giggles and squeals, “Owwwww! Riggie, get this little bird off me. Oh! You crazy, crazy, crazy — ” and the pair laugh and laugh. Gober is grinning too, mildly; the cigarette burning down in his hands. He stands and watches them for a moment as they wrestle with one another in the tangled covers of the bed. Then he leaves the bedroom and walks through the living room into the tiny closet kitchen. Opening the square icebox, he studies the insides until he sees a dish of onion soup, pulls it out, and sets it aside while he plugs in the burner over which he will heat it. He stands and waits. Behind him, back in their bedroom, his parents make the noise of love; and from somewhere up above him, a radio blares a snatch of blues.

• • •

Again, she had lied to him.

She had said, “No, Pop, he wasn’t in the place tonight.”

“You know the one I mean?”

“I know who you mean.”

“Those spics got nothing better to do than move up from Puerto Rico and go on relief! Their kids organize gangs and go out looking for people to kill. I used to think it was bad enough with the black ones living a few blocks from us — now it’s worse. New York City is busting its seams with the scum of the earth!”

“All right, Pop. All right. I’m tired. I’m going to bed.”

“I’d like to catch him coming around to the luncheonette. I’d show that brazen little bastard! Thinks he can associate with any daughter of mine! Filth!”

“Good night, Pop.”

“You stay away from the likes of them, do you hear? Even in school! Keep your distance from their kind.” “All right, Pop. Good night.”

In her bedroom, after she has undressed and brushed her black hair, and turned her blankets back, Anita takes the paper napkin from her pocketbook, and looks at the picture, a faint smile playing on her mouth. She tries to say the Spanish words, mispronouncing them. She whispers:
No sabe como te quiero;
puzzling over their meaning. From a popular song she had heard, she knows
yo te amo
means “I love you;” but what do these words say?
No sabe come te quiero.

Turning the napkin over, Anita looks at the little game she had played with herself, after he had stalked out. It was a game where you wrote down two names; crossed out any letters in each which were the same; and then with the remaining letters in each, you said: “Love, marriage, friendship, hate,” in that order. Both had come out
love.

She sits on the bed hugging her knees; remembering his eyes, how they had watched her; and how he had said her name — Nita.

• • •

Babe Limon rolls over in the narrow bed set against the wall in the one-room apartment on Madison and 106th. The red neon sign from the bar beneath her shines in, showing the shabby furnishings. Babe sighs and pushes a curler back around a lock of her hair. “You still awake, Babe?”

Beside her, Marie Lorenzi lies, dressed in bra and panties. Babe wears a faded pink slip.

“Yeah. It’s two o’clock.”

“You think your old lady’s coming home tonight?”

“I told you I doubt it!”

“Well, don’t bite my head off. I didn’t want to stay over. Could of slept at home just as well!”

“If she does come home, I can push the chairs together…. She won’t.”

“Where is she? Downstairs?”

“Who knows? Maybe at my aunt’s.”

“You still thinking about Gober?”

“What if I am!”

“What’s so hard to forget! Cripes, I seen a million Gobers!”

“You don’t know — ”

“Don’t know what?”

“The way Gober could be, is all.”

“How could he be?”

“Well, before all this, you know? When I was first going with him he used to be special about me. Geez, I don’t know, Marie. He used to call me Princess. He used to tell me I was a princess.”

“Gober?”

“Yeah. I wish you knew him. I mean, I know lotsa guys, but till Gober come into my life, I never felt like anything. That’s what steams me, Marie. I always felt like something because of him, and now because of how he’s been acting lately, I feel like nothing. I mean, what he said about me washing my face, and the thing about the cat. Like I was nobody.”

Marie leans across Babe and grabs for her package of cigarettes on the chair, on the top of the pile of their clothing. She passes one to Babe, and they light up, blowing smoke out into the stuffy air of the room. Marie lets the cigarette dangle from her lips, and props her arms up behind her head as she lies there talking.

“How old were you the first time, Babe?”

“Twelve. Thirteen. I don’t know … How old were you?”

“Fourteen. It happened in a line-up. Eight guys, and me howling my lungs out. S’funny, it never occurred to me it’d hurt so damn much. S’funny — even hurting like it did, I remember something that hurt a lot more that night.”

“Yeah? What?”

“These guys were paying fifty cents, see. I was making four dollars. Cripes, I was so scared and just lying there wishing I was dead instead of there, and hoping it’d be over soon. This one guy looks down at me and says, ‘I wouldn’t pay a nickle for this piece! It’s got pimples, and it’s flat as I am!’ “ Marie exhales a cloud of smoke. “I never forgot that. I was just a kid. I didn’t even know what I was doing. My brother — you know Al — he arranged it, and I couldn’t believe I’d get four dollars for just letting some guys do that. And when it hurt, I thought they must be doing it wrong. But when that guy said that, I couldn’t say anything back, or move, or anything. I felt like dying. That’s where I got my inferior complex from.”

“I’d never go in a line-up,” Babe says. “Never! Not for anything!”

“I didn’t even get the four bucks. Al gave me fifty cents of the money.”

“Whatever made you do it?”

“Geez, Babe, you don’t ask yourself that, you know? You don’t ask yourself that. You’re just a kid and things happen. Geez, I don’t know why.”

“Yeah, yeah. Things happen,” Babe says. She says, “I didn’t know you had an inferior complex.”

“From that day on.”

“Yeah?”

“I never forgot it.”

Babe bends down and drops her cigarette in a half-filled cup of cold coffee on the floor beside the bed. “You ought to take some exercises — massage — you know? You can send away a quarter and get a book that tells all about it.”

“I tried that.” Marie Lorenzi yawns. “They don’t do any good. Geez, it’s ten after one. Here, put my butt out, will you? Let’s get some sleep.”

“Pleasant dreams!” says Babe.

“Good night,” Marie answers, “Sleep tight. Don’t let the bed bugs bite.”

• • •

Sitting around the coffee table in the living room of the Roans’ apartment up in Morningside Heights, are Dan and his wife, and the Mannerheims.

“It’s one-ten,” Enid Roan says. “I vote we call it a night.”

“No, wait — just let me make my point, honey. Look, Nat, I’m not a fanatic. It’s just that I’ve seen these kids — ”

“Kids!” Nat Mannerheim exclaims. “Kids!”

His wife says, “Dan, Nat and I just don’t have your zeal. It’s a fine thing to treat youngsters individually; in fact, it’s the only way they can be treated. But to expect to accomplish anything with a gang of reluctant hooligans who don’t even want to be helped — I draw the line there!”

Dan Roan leans forward and knocks the dottle out of his pipe, holding it in his hand as he talks. “Martha, you and Nat are both psychologists. Child psychologists. I’m just a social worker, more or less. My only point is that all of us should work side by side to tackle this problem.”

“Why, Dan? It isn’t the only problem in the world. Give me a nice complicated schizophrenic child any day, but save me from a bunch of characters straight out of ‘Blackboard Jungle.’ I wouldn’t know where to begin, and as Martha says, I don’t have your zeal, so I’d probably not get anywhere. No, no, Dan — I’m a Freudian, a real party-line Freudian. One at a time, individually; analysis — that’s the only answer. Otherwise you have bedlam!”

“We have it now, Nat. Have you ever seen a rumble?”

“Well, perhaps that’s the answer. Remember the Malthusian theory, Dan? If the population increases more than the means of increasing subsistence does, in time many must starve, or be ill fed — or
rumble.
Rumble and finish one another off. It’s not exactly the Malthusian theory, but it may be nature’s way of taking care of these young hoods. They’ll destroy one another in rumbles. Hmmm?”

“It’s late,” Enid Roan says. “Let’s call it a night.”

“Enid’s right!” Martha Mannerheim agrees. Her husband stands up and slaps Dan Roan across the back. “Buck up, old man. You have the weight of the world on your shoulders tonight. These kids are getting you down. Why, they’re probably all home right now, tucked in their beds, dreaming of zip guns.” Nat Mannerheim chuckles. “To say nothing of bims, ah, Dan? Do I have the jargon right?”

“You have the jargon down pat, Nat.”

“That’s what would be of interest to me,” Martha Mannerheim muses, “this lingo of theirs. Its origin. It would be interesting to speculate how many of those terms have oral allusions. Somebody ought to do a paper on it.”

W
HY
, G
OBER WONDERS
, is Flat Head Pontiac asking for it? To walk by cool is really asking for it; and this, added to Pontiac’s promise to make the scene with Babe on Friday night, comes out rumble. What is it that makes the Jungle chief so rumble-hungry? Gober ponders this as Pontiac passes him, in front of the candy store on 100th and Madison. It is four o’clock on a Monday afternoon; and Gober is standing there with Eyes, both having just come from school.

“He’s coming on like a goddam snowman, Gobe. Look-it.” Eyes says under his breath.

“Yeah, I see him.”

Pontiac is a six-foot, broad-shouldered, husky Italian. He walks toward them with a slow, deliberate, panther-like tread, chin held high, eyes half closed, head swaying very slightly from side to side.

He takes his time. He knows what he is doing. He is the coolest of the cool.

As he is parallel with Gonzalves, Gober sneers at him.

“How’s your hammer hanging, Pontiac?”

Without looking anywhere but straight ahead, and without batting an eyelash or moving a muscle in his face; Pontiac says, “Heavy — but gonna be a lot lighter Friday night, King-man.”

This is the extent of their conversation; but now everything between them is spelled out unmistakably. This is the engraved invitation to rumble, the real personal touch.

“Whooooo!” Eyes exclaims after Pontiac is a yard beyond them.

“Yeah,” Gober answers. “He wants it real bad, all right. Well, we’ll see if he’s all talk and no action.”

“I’m jap-happy now, if I never was, Gobe. Some gangs I wouldn’t pull a jap rumble on, but the Jungles are crying for it.”

“I think it wouldn’t be a bad idea you and Tea mosey around and smell the wind in their turf. Be sure they don’t jump us before we jump them.”

“I’m thinking the same thing myself. Wonder where the hell Tea is?”

“ ‘S Monday. I think he usually scores on Mondays. Probably sleeping under a blanket of the snow now. He in school today?”

“Yeah; left before last bell, though.”

“That’s where he is. Out scoring. He’ll be by.”

“Shall we amble on into the store, Gobe?”

“You go on in. I want to catch Nothin’ Brown when he comes around.”

“You gonna talk to Babe about Friday? I see her in there. Back booth. With Easy Marie.”

“Yeah, I’m setting things straight with her. Probably take her over to the clubhouse.”

“Atta boy!” de Jarro says.

Gonzalves stands alone then, looking up the street for a sign of Junior Brown. Under his arm, tucked in a copy of an English book, is this letter:

In the distance, ambling along licking a fried chicken neck, Nothin’ Brown heads for the candy store; and seeing him, Gober goes to meet him….

• • •

Everybody calls the candy store Dirty Mac’s; and this afternoon as Red Eyes enters, it is like all other afternoons. Everybody is there. Blitz Gianonni stands by the peanut machine; not that he would try to pinch it — he would not, though this is his specialty, swiping them and selling them to a vending machine dealer up on 125th — Blitz would not pull that on Dirty Mac. But he stands by it out of sentiment; looking at it with loving concern, because it is a very new and shiny red peanut machine, and he cannot keep from admiring it.

He is telling Braden, who stands beside him, how easy it would be to “just vamoose wid de machine. It’s like nothing,” he explains, fondling the little chain attaching the machine to the wall, “you spread de link wid de chisel, take de bolt out, and walk off wid de thing.”

“How much you get for those, anyway?” Red Eyes asks, stepping up to the pair, looking around at the others in Mac’s. Flash is in a booth with two girls, his leg up on the table, showing off his new blue lizard shoes. Two Heads Pigaro is playing the pinball, punching and jamming himself into it until the red light tells Tilt!

“How much?” Blitz says. “Fifteen dollars, usual. Can get three on a good night. The outside ones the easiest.”

“You hear about D.&D., Eyes?” Braden asks.

“Uh-uh.”

“He got sent off to finishing school. Came up this morning in lolly-pop court. He got sent off by that horny judge with the lisp. You know him?”

“Know him? He’s the creep put me on probation!”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. He says to me he’s gonna give me a chance. He says he’s got his eyes on me; I come around again, I go off to college too.”

“ ‘At’s cause you’re too obvious,” Gianonni says. “You got picked up stealing, dint you? Dint you get picked up on a fire escape wid a pipe?”

“Yeah. I was just breaking this window, you know-cracking it with the pipe. Lady downstairs hears the noise ‘n starts in screaming.”

Blitz nods his head sympathetically; then he points a finger at Red Eyes, wagging it as he talks, “Listen, next time remember somethin’. You going to steal by breaking in a window, you take a pillow for your tool, see? A plain old pillow, see? Somebody see you walking along with a pillow, they ain’t gonna suspect, even going up a fire escape. So you’re going to a roof to sit and you brung a pillow, see? Then you take this pillow and break the window, ‘n you got the sound all muffled and somethin’ to catch the glass in, see? It’s a natural. Nobody gonna suspect a guy walking along carryin’ a pillow.”

Red Eyes shrugs. “Ain’t gonna be no next time.”

“No?”

“Naw. I can’t see it. Get sent to Coxsack, someplace — ”

“If you’re smart you don’t get sent nowhere. You just gotta be smart, Eyes.”

“Naw, I got interests close to my heart to protect.”

“I got those too, man, but I learn one thing this world. Them interests get a lot more interested you, you got a little moola to spend. You know?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Eyes says unenthusiastically.

Braden grins. “Blitz, ain’t you heard about old Eyes here? He’s struck oil right in his own backyard. He don’t have to cruise.”

“Shove it!” Eyes snaps.

“No, I wouldn’t do that,” Braden interrupts. “I’m saving mine for bigger things.”

• • •

The three Kings stand there like that around the peanut machine, making small talk and yammering. Despite his denial, what Blitz has told Eyes about the pillow interests Eyes. Eyes needs money. He needs seventeen dollars. As he thinks about it, his fingers unconsciously caress an envelope he carries in the hind pocket of his trousers. Like Gober, Eyes has a letter with him this day, a letter of utmost importance; a letter, which like Gober’s, contains that long-shot link to some world better and bigger and kinder. It is each boy’s ace: the secret something that holds hope, however wild and unlikely, and is too desperately believed in by each to mention to another. Unlike Gober, Eyes did not write his letter, but received it three weeks after he had answered this advertisement in the back pages of a comic magazine:

The letter was the first one Eyes had ever received in his life; and his mother had said when she found it in their box, “Dominic de Jarro — now who the hell is that?”

Eyes told her, “It’s your beloved sonny boy, that’s who the hell it is, and give it to me.”

“I’ll put a match to it, you little bastard!” she’d responded, but she had given it to him.

Eyes had read it, trembling. J. Marius Mahler, president of the Arco Song Writers Association, assured him that he had great promise, wanted to be the first to congratulate him, and for an initial fee of seventeen dollars would find the
right
arrangement for his song.

Eyes had read the letter again and again, barely able to contain himself until Dolores Ventura had come home from her factory job at six o’clock. The two had taken the letter to the roof, and there sat together rereading it, discussing it, planning and rejoicing.

“You ought to write them, Dom, and reassure them about them being the ones that can write the music. They sound sorta afraid you might not let them?”

“What part?”

“Here. See? They say they hope to be the lucky ones to give you that assistance. See? Right here.”

“Oh, yeah. They’re the ones give me the encouragement the first place — geez, naturally I’d let them be the ones.”

“You’re going to be famous, Dom.”

“Geez, I don’t know. S’funny, I always knew I could write lyrics. I listen them all the time, you know?”

“And you’ll get fancy and forget all about me, I bet.”

“Lorry, all I want is to get us outa here. Get hitched and just get outa here. Geez, I wouldn’t forget about you. Dint I write that song for you?”

“Seventeen dollars is a lot of money, ‘Dom. Where you gonna get it? Dom, you gotta promise you won’t — ”

“Naw, Lorry. Dint I promise you I was straight now?”

“I could maybe save a little from my salary — except for Uncle Jesus. He always wants to know. He always asks and I gotta give it to him. If it wasn’t for …”

“I’ll kill him some day. If he ever touches you — ”

“Maybe Mr. Roan could tell you how to get it, Dom.”

“Me!” Red Eyes had exclaimed. “Me — going places!”

• • •

Standing there in Dirty Mac’s, Eyes thinks back on that night. He should go and see Dan, this he knows; but he must hang around a while until Tea shows up. Tea and he have business in the Jungle turf. He can’t chicken on that assignment.

“Hey, you guys see Tea?” Red Eyes says.

Blitz shrugs. “Ain’t it Monday? He’s probably up town trying to score.”

Braden, who has been standing silently looking back at the booth where Babe Limon and Marie are sitting, says, “I think that Marie is a goddam Lesbian, way she wears them slacks alla time.”

“Naw,” Blitz disagrees. “It’s cause her ankles is fat. She tole me that once. Comes right out wid it when I’m set to open her box. I told her if I cared what she looked like I wouldn’t be there. And she bawls the whole while I’m working! Broads! Dey’re nuts or somethin’!”

“Her feelings was hurt,” Red Eyes says.

“She’s de one brought her goddam fat ankles up. I dint!”

“You don’t understand women,” Braden says, “You’re a slob.”

“Oh, yeah, yeah. I tink I’m gonna have to unnerstand women a whole lot once I get ta be a big man. Oh, yeah, yeah, I tink so! I tink women gonna have unnerstand
me.”
Blitz slaps the side of the peanut machine. He moans, “Oh boy, how I wanna unnerstand women!”

“They’re all right,” Braden says.

Eyes says, “Where’d we be without them?”

• • •

One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street bustles. People jam the sidewalks and spill out into the gutter. The afternoon is muggy and hot; but up in Harlem even muggier and hotter.

Tea Bag Perrez stands outside a record store. The music from inside is pumped through a speaker to the street. People seem to move to the music, seem to walk in beat with it, some with their feet going fast; others dragging, shaking some part of their body to it; but with it — in beat — some sitting on stools near the curb, some standing like Tea; and the music blaring out hot on a hot day, like heaping coals on a going fire; and the sweat soaking everyone. And Sara Vaughn’s voice.

Tea checks the clock in the window of the café next door. Ace is half an hour late. It’s not like him. Timing is everything. Didn’t he teach Tea that? If you want to score, timing is everything. It only snows on time. Tea shifts the weight of his body from one foot to the other; makes time pass looking into the faces of the women, playing the game with himself. One day he is standing on a street and he sees her face suddenly in the crowd. Still young. Still pretty. Little. “Mamita mia!” “Tea Bag, my little Tea Bag. I look for you every place. Every place. Now I find you!” One day. One day he is standing there and it happens. “Mamita Mia!”

It only snows on time. Tea is jumpy; nervous. He has to figure it again. He has six caps left. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. If he can’t score today; he can still last. Maybe Ace is hung up somewhere; maybe someone goofed, the heat is on. If it’s too hot it can’t snow. Still no need to get rifty. Tea can joy-pop with the caps he was going to push. Last till Thursday. No need to get rifty. C’mon Ace.
Por Dios.
C’mon Ace!

Tea waits. Three o’clock, four, and half-past. C’mon Ace.
Ratero!
C’mon ooooh, snow, Ace — snow!

• • •

In the clubhouse where Gober has brought her, Babe Limon sits on the yellow couch fumbling with the black plastic straps of her handbag. Gober leans against the brick wall, lighting a cigarette.

“You got a new card table, huh, Gober?” Babe Limon says in a voice that is uncertain and somewhat nervous. “I never saw that here.”