Sleepers (14 page)

Michael opened the front of his blue denim jacket and reached a hand into one of the inside sleeves. He pulled out four folded, stolen comic books and dropped them to the ground. Then he yanked four more books from his other sleeve. When he reached both hands into the back of his jeans and took out three more, dropping them all at his feet, the man moved toward him, stepping over Tommy’s body.

“I kill all of you,” he said with teeth clenched.

“You’re gonna have to,” Michael said, balling his hands into fists, an arm’s length from the pipe.

“This is bad,” I remember saying. “This is so bad.”

The man left his feet and swung the pipe, missing Michael’s head by inches.

My eye caught John, his arms around Tommy, sweat streaking down his forehead, concern etched on his face. As a crowd collected, I looked at the faces surrounding me, the men focused on the action, most of them smoking, a few offering Michael free advice.

No one ever broke up a fight on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, no matter who the combatants were, regardless of the weapons used. A street fight was a respected ritual and no one dared step in.

Fights took place for any number of reasons, from unpaid debts to three-way love affairs gone sour, but the overwhelming majority occurred because they were the fastest and easiest way to settle a dispute.

Great street fights were talked about in the same nostalgic manner in which old boxers were recalled. The more street fights somebody had, the higher the esteem in which he was held.

Short of murder, nothing proved manhood more.

Michael swung a sharp right and missed, grunting loudly as the punch sailed over the man’s head. A fast follow-up left also failed. Large sweat circles formed on the back of his jacket and under both arms. As the crowd drew closer, the man moved to narrow the gap between the two. He took three steps forward, flashing the pipe, holding it low, squinting against the overhead sun, staring at Michael’s face.

He swung the pipe, short, fast, and hard, landing one across Michael’s hip. A second blow caught him on the side of the face. Another quick swing, this one grazing Michael’s jaw, sent him backward, hands reaching for the ground, his head just missing the side of a fire hydrant.

The man walked to where Michael lay and raised the pipe over his head.

“You no steal from me again,” he said in a voice meant for everyone to hear.
“Nobody
steal from me again.”

Michael’s arms hugged the hydrant, his eyes cloudy, thin streams of blood streaking down his lips. John stood next to Tommy, his face emptied of all emotion other than fear. Butter still had his back to the candy store wall. There were tears running down his face.

I couldn’t move. I stood there, shivering in the afternoon
sun, my legs heavy and numb, my stomach queasy, looking down at the beaten body of my best friend.

The crowd sensed a finish and closed the circle even tighter, breaking off any chance of a quick escape.

The street wanted someone to die.

“Drop the pipe!”

The voice came out of the shadows.

It was confident and webbed with the threat of violence. The man with the iron pipe took two steps back when he heard it, panic invading his macho veneer. I turned my head and saw King Benny standing there, a cup of espresso in one hand, a copy of
Il Progresso
in the other. He was flanked by two men, dressed in black, arms at their sides.

“Didn’t hear me?” King Benny asked.

“Yes,” the man said, his voice breaking. “I hear.”

“Then do it,” King Benny said.

The pipe fell to the ground, loud enough to echo.

“You wanna finish this?” King Benny asked, looking down at Michael.

“Yeah,” Michael said, pulling himself up against the side of the hydrant. “I do.”

“Then hurry,” King Benny said. “It’s gettin’ late.”

Michael was up on shaky legs. He turned and faced his opponent.

“Fight me,” Michael said to him.

“No,” the man said, his eyes on King Benny.

Michael charged the man, both of them falling to the ground, arms and legs in full swing. He landed two hard punches against the side of the man’s head and then threw a crushing elbow to the base of his nose.

The man swung once and missed, a steamless punch thrown more in frustration than anger. Michael answered with two more closed blows to the face, the second drawing blood. The men in the crowd whistled and applauded each landed punch.

“Kid’s got him now,” a fat man in an oil-stained work shirt said. “Couple more, the bastard’ll be done for good.”

“Too bad he ain’t got a knife,” a short man lighting a pipe said. “He could cut him for sure.”

Michael landed three more punches, all flush to the man’s face. He jumped to his knees, slamming an ankle against the man’s throat. Two more punches to the neck and a quick kick to the chest brought it to an end.

Michael stepped over the man, ignored the pleas of the crowd to finish his foe, and walked to the comic books strewn on the ground. He bent down, picked each up, and went back to where he had left the man. He stood over him, staring for a minute, and then dropped the comic books across his face and chest.

“You can keep your comic books,” Michael said. “I don’t want ’em anymore.”

11

A
S WE GREW
older, the violence around us intensified. The moment a boy’s age hit double digits, he was no longer a mere nuisance to the older neighborhood kids; he was a potential threat. The most minor infractions could easily escalate into major street brawls.

We had now also reached an age where we were targeted by outsiders looking for quick scores.

Puerto Ricans coming down from San Juan Hill in upper Manhattan would jump a kid, lift his money, and head back home. Blacks from Inwood, near the Heights, would cross the designated racial divide of Ninth
Avenue. Traveling in packs of a half-dozen or more, they would swarm, attack, and leave before any retaliation could be mounted.

A number of the local street gangs attempted to recruit us, without success. The idea of being a gang member never held much appeal and neither did the idea that we had to kick back portions of earnings to the leader of the pack we joined.

We also weren’t keen on the initiation process most gangs required: rubbing hot pieces of iron on your arm until all the skin came off; scarring you with strange, permanent tattoos; forcing you to pick a fight with the toughest guy from a rival gang, and
if
you beat him you were in. If you lost, you were a forgotten man. It wasn’t for us. We stayed with who we trusted and we covered each other’s backs. Just like in the western movies we admired.

T
HE WORST BEATING
I ever got in Hell’s Kitchen came not from my father or any other man or boy. It was at the hands of Janet Rivera, street leader of the Tornadoes.

Girl gangs had, throughout Hell’s Kitchen history, been in many ways the most vicious. Unlike their male counteiparts, the girls often attacked without warning or reason. They were also the more aggressive criminals, wantonly stalking passersby for street muggings and casing buildings for doorway robberies. They did not belong to any organized crime faction, but worked as independent operators, hired out for the best price.

In the ’60s, these gangs could already trace their lineage back to the Lady Gophers, who terrorized the Manhattan waterfront at the turn of the century. The Lady Gophers had a special calling card: They left the
amputated hands and fingers of their victims behind. A few years later, Sadie the Cat and her crew beat and mugged at will. Gallus Meg was a match for any man she came across, boasting till death of never having lost a fistfight. Hellcat Maggie was said to have once beaten four of the toughest members of the Pug Uglies Gang into submission on a Tenth Avenue street corner, then taken a fifth one home to her boardinghouse bed.

A number of the female gang leaders who lived long enough to survive their street battles opened saloons in their later years. Not surprisingly, many served as bouncers in their own watering holes.

“They
demanded
respect, those women,” one of King Benny’s back-room men once told me. “They didn’t take any shit, they were always ready for a fight. Knew how to run a business, too, turned a profit on most things they touched. They were tough and mean and everything they did, they made sure they did better than a man. They fought dirty, drank till they were drunk, and slept with whoever they wanted. For a time there, they ran the Kitchen and they ran it well.”

The prevailing image of the mid-twentieth-century Hell’s Kitchen street gang comes from the musical
West Side Story.
While Leonard Bernstein’s masterpiece contains traces of truth—the racial tensions, a sense of place, the fear of falling in love on forbidden turf, the inability to move beyond social labels—such elements weren’t enough for neighborhood cynics.

West Side Story
was the most hated film in Hell’s Kitchen.

“That movie sucked,” Fat Mancho complained. “Guys dancin’ around like jerks, girls hangin’ on to their boys for life, cops dumb as flies. All bullshit. Made the gangs look soft. Made
everybody
look soft. In real life, soft didn’t last long. They
buried
soft in Hell’s Kitchen.”

J
ANET
R
IVERA STOOD
in front of the monument at the entrance to De Witt Clinton Park and popped the lid of a can of Rheingold. She was with three friends, all members of her street gang. One of them, Vickie Gonzalez, had a straight razor in the back pocket of her Levi’s. Janet swigged the beer and watched me walk into the park with John, both of us bouncing spauldeens against the ground.

“Hey!” she yelled. “Get your asses over where I can see them.”

“Now what,” John muttered.

“They’re just breakin’ balls,” I said. “We got no beef with them.”

“We got no time for this,” John said.

“Let’s see what they want,” I said.

“C’mon,” Rivera said. “Don’t be draggin’ ass on me.”

“She is one ugly girl,” John said as we made our way toward the monument. “Her family must take ugly pills.”

“You pricks walk through the park like you own it,” Rivera said, pointing at us with the hand holding the beer. “Where the fuck you think you’re goin’?”

“We’re gonna play some ball,” I said. “I don’t think there’s a problem with that.”

“You’re wrong,” Rivera said. “There is a major fuckin’ problem.”

“Fill us in, gorgeous,” John said.

We knew what the problem was. Two weeks earlier, Michael, rushing to Tommy’s defense, got into a street brawl with a Puerto Rican kid named Rapo from the West 60s. He won the fight and forced Rapo to walk out of Hell’s Kitchen buck naked. Unfortunately, Rapo was Janet Rivera’s cousin, and she was looking to us for a payback.

Vickie Gonzalez put a hand in the pocket that held the razor. The other two girls wrapped sets of brass knuckles around their hands. Janet Rivera tossed her
beer can into a clump of grass behind her. None of them looked happy. What
would
make them happy would be to leave me and John the way Michael had left Rivera’s cousin—beaten, bruised, and naked. Neither one of us was eager to see that happen, and it left us with only one choice, one that any tough, street-savvy Hell’s Kitchen hard case would have made. We decided to run.

“Through the fence!” I yelled to John as we started. “Head for the candy store.”

“They catch us, we’re dead,” John said. “That ugly one wants to kill me. I can tell.”

“They’re
all
ugly,” I said, looking over my shoulder. “And what’s worse is they’re
all
fast.”

We ran through a circular hole in a fence on the 11th Avenue side of the fields, across the red clay pitcher’s mound and out the other side, past the Parkies’ way station and the sprinkler pool. We were crisscrossing around the black pool bars when I slipped on a sandhill and landed on my side against a cement edge.

John stopped when he saw me fall.

“Get up, Shakes,” he urged. “They’re right on us.”

“I can’t,” I said.