The Amboy Dukes

Irving Shulman

The Amboy Dukes

Every writer hopes to reach many readers. Usually, we must be satisfied with hundreds. I have been lucky enough to have had millions of people read my three books about crime in this country: THE AMBOY DUKES, CRY TOUGH! and THE BIG BROKERS. Yet, most of them have read abridged, altered versions. I am very happy that THE AMBOY DUKES is now going to reach the millions of readers for whom I wrote it in exactly the version that I intended it to be read.

IRVING SHULMAN

The bunches stood on the corners. The Bristol Friends, the Herzl Street Boys, the Amboy Dukes. Each bunch idled on its own corner, although members from Sutter Avenue bunches, East New York cliques, and Williamsburg gangs might be visiting and strengthening alliances. Off Pitkin Avenue were the unobtrusive but sinister poolrooms, barbershops, and fly-specked candy stores that served as hangouts and depositories for brass knuckles, knives, and an occasional gun.

The boys stood around on Saturday nights, ready for action. Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-two, they stood on the corners and discussed the deadly gossip of rackets: whores, guys who were cut up, and the dough you could make from one sweet job. Their voices, purposely brutalized and wildly boisterous, attracted little attention from the strollers on Pitkin Avenue, but as young men and women approached the corners they walked close to the curbs to minimize the jeers and dirty comments that were tossed at them. The bunches spoiled for a fight, and their technique was swift and murderous: a kick in the ankle, a hook to the groin, a clout behind the ear—then some well-placed kicks in the kidneys and head, and the victim was ready for the ambulance.

The boys were of one face and form, and their viciousness was not tempered by youth. Lean or fat, tall or short, their bodies were hard, their eyes narrow and cruel, their lips thin and bitter, and on their right hands they wore large cameo signet rings which served as cutting weapons. Alert and tense, they smoked endlessly and spat constantly as they sought for the opportunity to begin slugging. The boys were careful of their dress, and since it was late spring they wore pastel tan, blue, and brown gabardine suits: three-button jackets, ticket pocket, center vent, deep pleated trousers with dropped belt loops, pegged from twenty-four inches at the knees to sixteen inches at the cuffs. Sharp. They wore open-collared sport shirts or white, blue, or brown buttoned-down oxford shirts, and their ties were tied neatly in broad knots. Nonchalantly they swung long key chains that hung from a right or left belt loop, and the keys spun in continuous enlarging and contracting circles. The boys sported duck-tail haircuts: long, shaggy, and clipped to form a point at the backs of their heads. Their slick vaselined hair shone in the reflections of light.

Hour after hour they stood on the corners, jeering and spitting at strangers, and only speaking reverently to real mobsters who might pass by. Then they wondered when they were going to have the cash to promote a trim dish like the piece hanging onto Buggsy Stein’s arm. Numbers and slot machines and the black market paid off. Not working like hell in school or in a bastard defense plant or shipyard where they had spotters who would turn you in for sleeping on the job or shooting a little crap in one of the storerooms.

Frank Goldfarb puffed hard on the cigarette and jingled the coins in his pocket. Then he looked at his new wrist watch. His father and mother had left it on the kitchen table that morning with a note that stated that the watch was to celebrate three things: his fourteenth birthday, his graduation from school next month, and for last year, when he had been
bar mitzvah
and they could not afford to buy him anything.

The watch was a beauty, and Frank held it to his ear to listen to the strong steady tick.

“Got a new watch?” one of the Dukes asked him.

“Yeah.” Frank nodded. “My pop gave it to me.”

The Duke held Frank’s wrist and examined the watch. “Not bad, kid,” he finally said. “Take care of it. Never slug a guy while you’re wearin’ a good watch,” he advised Frank. “First take it off and put it in your pocket. But you gotta do it fast. Remember, fast.”

“Thanks,” Frank said reverently.

The Duke winked at Frank and refused the cigarette Frank offered him. “Try one of these.” He extended his open cigarette case to Frank. “They’re reefers. If you’re gonna smoke y’might’s well get a kick outa it.”

Frank recoiled.

The Duke’s look became hard and brittle. “What’s the matter?” he asked slowly. “Afraid? We ain’t got room for guys in the Dukes who’ve got crap in their blood.”

Frank hesitantly lit the reefer. The Duke winked encouragingly at Frank.

Hell, Frank thought, this is like smoking a regular butt. Frank smiled as he exhaled. This was the life. He pushed into the mob and walked along Pitkin Avenue, feeling the thrust and excitement of a crowd that moved with purpose.

Any night in the week, but especially Friday and Saturday nights, Pitkin Avenue was a packed and vibrant street, raucous with movement and color, and between Saratoga and Rockaway avenues there walked an intent mass of shoppers, strollers, and loungers who moved with purpose along the avenue, pausing to appraise the store windows, the arguments of the political speakers, and the appearance of other people.

Both sides of the avenue were lined with bright stores, restaurants, and chop suey joints. Radios from second-story repair shops blared into the street, and at the corner of Pitkin and Amboy a Socialist speaker, flanked by an American flag, stood on a ladder and hoarsely harangued the crowd. On Pitkin and Hopkinson the speaker was a Communist, on Pitkin and Bristol, a Socialist-Laborite.

The crowds swelled, eddied, and pushed along the sidewalks. The strollers entered restaurants and ice-cream parlors or stood at the open windows of candy stores and hot-dog stands, drinking nickel malteds, nickel ice-cream sodas, and three-cent egg creams. They ate frankfurters heavy with mustard, large dripping ice-cream sandwiches, cones filled with varicolored custards, and they nibbled on large nutted squares of chocolate that cost three cents, two for a nickel. Occasionally a connoisseur would buy a candy-covered cherry for two cents, carefully bite into the chocolate shell that enclosed the cherry and liquid, and stand still, enraptured, as he savored the richness and fullness of sweet delight as the chocolate, liquid, and cherry melted and blended in his mouth.

Last year when Frank had been bar mitzvah the crowd had been a listless one. For in 1941 Brownsville was a wasted, hopeless neighborhood, with home relief and WPA employment as its principal occupations. But that was last year, and in 1942 the war hit Brownsville with a smashing impact that jarred this depressed and ruined slum area out of its hopeless lethargy. Jobs could be had for the asking, and employers no longer made demands for skill, experience, high school graduates, or Anglo-Saxon backgrounds. In ever-increasing numbers people in Brownsville left the WPA and home relief for the shipyards in the Erie Basin, on Staten Island, and Kearney, New Jersey, which hired any man or woman who wanted a job. At the New York Port of Embarkation and the Brooklyn Navy Yard there were jobs as laborers, porters, packers, warehousemen, stockmen, and clerks for all who applied. Huge ads and posters appeared in the newspapers and subways which insisted that it was every citizen’s patriotic duty to take a job, and Brownsville went to work. The Lexington Avenue and New Lots expresses were jammed with people going to their jobs, and twenty-four hours a day the New Lots local disgorged at Saratoga and Rockaway avenues thousands of people who were returning to their Brownsville flats to eat hot greasy meals and drink gallons of seltzer, Dr. Brown’s Celray Tonic, and Pepsi-Cola.

For Frank Goldfarb’s father there was the job that he had always wanted: sewing-machine operator in a union shop that manufactured military uniforms; and somehow Mrs. Goldfarb found herself working in an ordnance plant, packing .50-caliber bullets in web belting. With all the overtime they wanted, the Goldfarbs began to eat better, pay off their debts, buy new beds and springs and mattresses, maple furniture for the kitchen, new clothes and shoes and hats and suits and dresses and watches and rings and junk jewelry. Then the miracle of war bonds and a bank account came to the Goldfarbs, and at last they were economically stable, income-tax payers, solid, solvent members of a community which shook off the worn cloak of poverty.

With his hands thrust into the pockets of his blue pegged pants Frank sauntered along the avenue, enjoying his contact and association with the crowd. Occasionally he touched the tooled leather of his new belt, and as he passed mirrored store windows he paused to look at his reflection in the glass. This crowd had money, could pay for anything in any store with new crisp bills, bright shiny coins, or impressive government checks. It was good to walk along, feeling the heavy coins in his pocket and crackling the crisp dollar bills in his fist, and knowing that Miss Moscovitz, the home-relief investigator, would no longer be butting into his family’s affairs. There was no longer a need for a home-relief allotment which kept getting less and less as the arguments at home became worse and worse, until their Amboy Street flat always seemed to have been filled with the loud voice of his father and the shrill screaming of his mother.

That was all gone, buried in a past that Frank did not want to remember but which he could not forget. And it was when he remembered the past: the cheap twelve-dollar bar mitzvah suit that Uncle Hershell had bought for him and for which he had had to take a thousand dollars’ worth of crap about his father who’d rather remain unemployed and on relief than work in a non-union shop; it was when he remembered the past with its orange and blue food stamps, clothing tickets, and continual begging and pleading for a little more relief, a little more money for food, a little more money for the things that they needed, that Frank would seek refuge on the corner of his block and stand reverently with the little guys, the punks, and watch the big guys in the bunch. He would grin like an idiot fool when one of the big guys would nod to him or even ask him for a cigarette.

Now he was fourteen, and maybe the guys would permit him to hang around more often and listen to their talk. Soon, he hoped, he would be considered one of the boys, in the gang, solid with the right guys, an accepted member of the bunch on his block.

One Sunday in April 1944, Alice Goldfarb leaned back in her seat on top of the Fifth Avenue bus and tried to count the stories of at least one of the tall apartment houses on Riverside Drive. But the bus moved too quickly and there was too much to see. To her left lay the green velvet stretch of park along the river; then there was the river, iridescent, bright, and magnificent in the early morning sun, and beyond the river the shores of another state, New Jersey. It was too exciting to concentrate on any one sight, and when the bus passed Grant’s Tomb, white and proud in its marble, so splendid that the picture of the tomb in her history book was an injustice, she could only point at the dome of the tomb, unable to say anything. Only after the bus passed the mausoleum did she realize that the body of a real genuine President of the United States lay entombed there, and before she could communicate her awe and wonderment to her brother Frank she saw a trim white, black, and red yacht proudly moving down the Hudson toward the bay; and actually to see so many things which heretofore had existed only in books and the movies made Alice wonder if she really had lived before this Sunday morning.

As the bus was halted by the red traffic light she leaned forward to look into the streets that ran into the Drive. The buildings rose story after story, strong and proud of the wealth housed in their duplex apartments, with wood-burning fireplaces in the libraries, parlors, and master bedrooms. Blue and black limousines stood at attention along the curbs, and sitting smartly in the drivers’ seats were the uniformed chauffeurs waiting patiently for the occupants of the apartments to descend to the street and to be driven to the churches and other places of smart assembly.

“Look!” Alice stuttered with excitement as she nudged Frank so that he might see the uniformed nursemaid slowly pushing a magnificent black-and-chromium baby coach, while behind her, at a proper distance, walked a maid with a pedigreed French poodle.

“The dog is like a Persian-lamb coat.” Alice’s face was bright with joy. “That must be what they make Persian-lamb coats from,” she concluded.

Frank squeezed his sister’s thin shoulders. “No, baby,” he said. “That’s some kind of fancy dog. They make Persian-lamb coats out of lambs that come from Persia. I think.”

“And look at that automobile!” Alice pointed at a black Rolls-Royce cabriolet with the canvas top down. In the back seat sat a dowager with her hair dyed platinum gray. The Rolls stopped close to them as the traffic light flashed red, and Alice stood up to lean over the rail of the bus. Silently she hoped that the light would not turn green again for at least a half-hour, so that she could fix forever in her memory the picture of the silent, regal old woman sitting erect, as if posture were the only worth-while thing in the entire world, aloof and unknowing of the bus which stood alongside her limousine. The bus groaned into low gear as the red light changed to green, but the Rolls, with a smooth and silent meshing of gears, drew away from the lumbering bus and disappeared into the traffic ahead.

Each block of the bus ride brought to Alice a new sight, a new joy. There were people walking arm in arm on the clean broad sidewalks; tall austere doormen resplendent in uniforms with brass buttons, who whistled imperiously at taxis to stop for people who waited with bored politeness under the canopies of apartment houses; gray limestone and marble mansions, with tall french windows in which hung heavy draperies that barred the sun and the prying gazes of the people who rode on top of the busses; unlittered parks with benches that were invitingly empty and private. And always the apartment houses that seemed to stretch and surge infinitely upward to end in roof gardens and penthouses, things so distant and remote from Alice’s imagination that the word image could evoke nothing but a gasp, as if Alice had mentioned the forbidden name of Jehovah.

Alice turned her thin childish face to Frank. “We’ll come back this way?”

“We oughta take the subway,” Frank replied. “We want to eat something before we go to the show.”

“I can always eat,” Alice whispered, for she feared that she was speaking too loudly for the sacredness of Riverside Drive, “that’s why I want to ride back on the bus.”