Life and Death of a Tough Guy (2 page)

Dineen swung him back onto the roof, still holding onto the boy’s arm. “Stop your damn cryin’! Lissen you! I’m gonna t’row you off the roof you don’t fight. You hear me! I’m gonna t’row you off you don’t fight!” And out of the corners of his eyes he glanced at Flaherty. There wasn’t a peep out of Flaherty and with a furious sense of satisfaction, Dineen thought, Flaherty could tell the gang any old story he wanted to now.

“Mama, mama,” Joey bawled helplessly.

Dineen grabbed Joey’s leg and began lifting him. Joey kicked, punching with his free hand. Dineen dropped him back on the roof, and with a mighty shove pushed him towards Georgie. “Fight you lil yeller bastid or I’ll t’row you off for real!”

Georgie like a pebble off a slingshot whirled at Joey. Joey kicked wildly, meeting the fists with his scratching fingers.

Kicking and scratching at all the terrors in his life.

Five stories up, the street had found him.

• • •

All he ever told his mother was that he had been in a fight; he was afraid to tell her he had been up on the roof. “Georgie hit me, Mama. He hit me….” As for George Connelly, he had won another fight. “I coulda licked him wid one finger,” Georgie had bragged to Fats Smith and Paddy Burley and Cheater Riordan and all the other little shanty micks down on the street. They didn’t believe Scarey Cat could put up any kind of fight until they had given him a bloody nose themselves.

But what was a bloody nose or a black eye? If the street could knot like a fist, it could also open a hand of friendship. Georgie and Fats, and the others, began to play with him when they all trooped home after school. In the autumn afternoons they played ringeleveo and Red Rover, cowboys and Indians. Joey learned to shoot marbles. He kept his champ shooter, banded with swirls of gold and dark green, in a piece of soft cloth. He collected the pictures of prize fighters that came with packs of cigarettes. John L. Sullivan, Jim Jeffries, Gentleman Jim Corbett — the heroes of all the pint-sized kids in Hell’s Kitchen — became his heroes, too.

“My Joey plays in the street all the time,” Mrs. Kasow complained to Mrs. Radisch the butcher store lady and to Mr. Buff the grocer whose store was also on Thirty-Eighth Street where the Jews for a mile around shopped for their kosher meat and smoked pink salmon and pumpernickel bread. And the Jewish storekeepers clucked their sympathy.

Oi
, the street, they condoled with her. The street of the
goyem
, the street of the Irisher pogromchiks. Perhaps, some day, the storekeepers hoped piously, there would be enough Jews in
der Teufel’s Kuche
for a Hebrew school where Jewish children could go and learn their
aleph, beth
— their a, b, c’s.

“My Joey will not speak Yiddish in the house,” Mrs. Kasow unburdened her heart to the storekeepers. “If I talk to him in our tongue he does not answer.” And she would sigh, staring at her friends in bewilderment.

Yes, something had happened to Joey all right. Flaherty the pigeon-flyer could’ve given her the lowdown or Dineen or Georgie Connelly. But between herself and the Irish there were too many screens. Even if she had been Irish herself, there would still have been the separate screen of a man’s world. Between all the mothers and their sons, the street lifted like a giant wall. He was growing up, Joey Kasow, and the street had become his new mother. A mother of red brick, her heart the iron sewer covers in the gutter where he played marbles, her voice the thunder of the Els on Ninth Avenue, her name, no name at all but a number, cold, inhuman, mathematical: Thirty-Seventh Street.

On the stone step leading into the vestibule of the tenement where he lived, Joey sat wedged between Georgie and Cheater, watching the girls playing patsy on the hot and yellow sidewalk of another summer. He was almost nine now. That summer morning on the roof, with the pigeons flying and the hawk and the fight with Georgie, was almost forgotten. Sometimes, at night he dreamed that great big birds with human heads were eating him up. Sometimes, the past flapped its huge and silent and eternal wing.

But now the girls were playing patsy while in the gutter the dusty sparrows scattered when a wagon lumbered by, stirring no memory of birds undulating in a blue sky to the wand of Flaherty’s bamboo pole. “See Mary’s drawers when she jumps,” Georgie whispered, grinning at Cheater and Joey Patsy players and sparrows, the sun a sheet of yellow tin fastened across the gutter under the rainless sky, and three small boys sitting in the street like fishermen on the edge of a magic river.

Oh, there was so much to see down on the street. Drunks, happy as kings or sobbing like babies as they walked a crooked line from the corner saloons on Ninth Avenue:

Some unknown Hell’s Kitchen poet had invented that epic and a dozen others like it that the kids were always singing. They would tag after a drunk, baiting him with their rhymes. They would throw sticks at the painted women and yell, “Hoors! Doity hoors!” And listen of a night to the big guys chewing the fat: “The Badgers killed a copper over on Tenth Avenoo….”

Nobody had to tell Georgie or Joey that the Badgers were the toughest gang in the whole West Side. “Oney one in our gang who’s gonna be a Badger when he’s big is me,” Georgie’d boast.

“Me, too,” Joey’d say.

“Nah! You ain’t game enough, Joey.”

Late one hot August morning when the sky was full of little white clouds clean as soap suds, they saw the witch who lived in their block coming up the sidewalk. They had been sitting in the shade, sweaty after a stickball game, seven or eight of them, Georgie, Cheater, Angelo, Fats and Joey. “Who wants-a see me put the horns on that ole witch?” Georgie said.

Joey listened to him uneasily. When he had asked his mother about the witch, she had shaken her head sadly. “Old Mrs. Pierce is not a witch. People have hearts of stone. Cannot they see what I see?”

“What do you see, Mama?”

“Her children have left her. She lives alone. Will you be a good son to me when I am old and gray like that poor old woman, Yussele?”

“Don’t call me Yussele!” he had shouted and rushed downstairs where Georgie and the others would’ve laughed for an hour if they could’ve heard his old woman with her
Yussele…
.

His mother’s voice was a thousand miles away now as Georgie pressed his two middle fingers down on his thumb, the forefinger and pinky finger pointing out stiffly — the horns. Angelo whispered, “Them witches talk to the devil inna night. They make people die, them witches.”

Was Mrs. Pierce a witch? And if she wore black, didn’t the old Italian women wear black, too? But she wasn’t an Italian, she had no family. She was different from everybody else on this street of Connellys and Flahertys, with a few odd-lot Italian, Jewish, German, Polish and God-knew-what-else scattered among the Irish. And that was enough for somebody to begin whispering about witches. So, Mrs. Kasow might have spoken to her son.

His mother’s voice, the voice of reason, snapped like the thinnest of threads. “Ole witch!” Georgie cried and darted out at the woman in black, pointing the horns at her. Angelo followed Georgie and the two of them ran around her in a big circle like kids around a bonfire in the winter. “Ole witch!” they hollered while she lifted her dead white hands, begging them to leave her alone.

“Ole witch makes you die!” Angelo screamed. “Gwan an’ die yerself, yuh ole witch!” Two or three other stickball players were sucked into the mad dance. And only Joey and Fats gaped as the old woman called for help. Angelo’s shoemaker father rushed out of his store. He chased the kids away and led his son off by the ear.

Safe in their backyard, Georgie turned on Fats and Joey. “You guys shouldn’ be inna gang!” he yelled. “You was scared stiff! Scared-a that ole witch! Yeller jewboy!”

Jewboy
.

It filled the air like a black cloud, it rammed down his throat, a black lump. It was all the blackness in the world.

“Georgie,” Joey pleaded, “I’ll holler on her nex’ time I see her — ”

“Yeller belly!” Georgie taunted him. “You and Fats — ”

“I’ll holler on her inna night!” Joey promised recklessly. “Inna night. Up her house!”

They all looked at him unbelievingly, for it was in the night, as everybody knew, that she changed into a witch, in the night, when old ladies’ faces became witches’ faces.

“I’ll show you who’s the game guy!” Joey challenged them. His gray eyes were moist, but there was a chip on his shoulder that hadn’t been there a second ago: a chip to last a lifetime. “Who’ll go with me tonight?”

Only Georgie met Joey in the hot breathing darkness, the men sitting on wooden boxes smoking, the women sucking on ices, waiting patiently for the breeze that might come from the river four avenues to the west. There the Hudson flowed to the sea and the piers, like the teeth of a comb, held the flowing starlit waters. Toward midnight, the women would comb their hair, too, and look at their aging faces in the mirrors, the street quiet, all footfalls fading, all voices sinking back in the red caves of throats quiet in sleep, with lust a drying spot on a sheet, and hope the smallest and whitest star in the tenement sky.

But now an Irish kid and a Jewish kid, who waited for no breeze, hurried silently down the sidewalk as if the night were a huge and menacing ear that served the witch. They passed the cellar bakery where ghosts white as flour sometimes sat on the barrels. They passed the house in the middle of the block from which a woman with a slashed neck had run on an autumn day, and the lamppost that marked the spot where gang murder had been done, and the hallway where a girl of ten had been dragged on a winter night. They came to the witch’s house and the Irish kid whispered softly, “Whatta we haffa do it for, Joey?”

“I’m game if you are — ”

Georgie said nothing, he shook himself like a wet dog. He made the sign of the cross as he followed Joey into the vestibule. Under a bowl of frosted glass, the blue gaslight burned, the brass-edged stairs gleamed. They had never been inside the witch’s house before, but they knew she lived on the top floor: on the streets of the poor there are no secrets.

They went up the stairs to her floor. From one of the front flats, a phonograph record was playing the song of the stone villages and shepherds. The two kids listened to the wailing music of the Greeks. From behind the door of the other front flat, they heard a man’s voice. Joey walked to the two doors in the rear, Georgie behind him. “Joey,” Georgie whispered.

“I’ll show yuh!” Joey muttered shakily.

From behind one of the rear doors, many voices rose and fell. There was only one door left. Joey pointed at it and Georgie looked at him with despair. “Joey — ”

“I’ll show yuh!”

Georgie crossed himself and suddenly he knocked on the last door. He was showing Joey now! Joey felt as if someone were rapping on his heart. He choked, he was afraid. Furiously, Georgie continued knocking with his left fist while his right hand described convulsive crosses in the semi-darkness of the hallway. Joey’s hand shot up with a jerky jellying life of its own, and in frantic imitation he too crossed himself. And crossed the pit between
goy
and Jew so that for a stunning second he seemed to be looking across at the other side, at his mother and father. Jewboys, he accused them and accused himself, his mouth twisting, his eyes blind in their sockets. Madly he kicked at the door. “Jewboy!” he cried incoherently. “Witch, you witch you!”

But the dark and mystic door on which a cross had flamed to destroy the six-pointed Jewish star remained shut. No witch flew out on a broomstick, no witch in witch’s black, blacker than coal, the black of hell, no witch with great white teeth smeared with blood.

A woman in a bathrobe rushed out from the flat next door. The Greek flat emptied into the corridor. The woman slapped at the retreating boys, one of the Greeks shouted in the most reproachful of voices as if aroused out of sweet sleep himself, “Wake up peepuls!”

“Greaseballs!” Georgie hollered when he was halfway down the stairs. And in the street, he crowed triumphantly. “We showed ‘em! Didn’t we, Joey?” He laughed and laughed. “Who’s the gamest guys onna block?” Georgie asked the whole wide world. He put his arm around Joey’s shoulders and in the clear pure light of friendship, they walked down the long dark street.

When Joey couldn’t sleep at nights for thinking of the cross he’d made up in the witch’s house, he was consoled a little by the memory of Georgie saying, “Who’s the gamest guys onna whole block!” And when the Jews in the neighborhood finally launched a little Hebrew school for their sons over on Thirty-Fifth Street, he wouldn’t go. His father beat him a dozen times, giving up finally with a bitter curse, “
Goldene Amerika
where the sons of Jews desert the customs of their fathers!”

Other customs, other fathers.

They were eleven and twelve years old now, Georgie Connelly and Joey Kasow, Cheater Riordan, Fats Smith, Angelo Esposito, and eight or nine others who had grown up on Thirty-Seventh Street. They had a real gang now called the 1-4-Alls. Georgie was the leader and he’d picked Joey as autocratically as Kaiser Wilhelm over there in Germany as Next. The Leader and Next Leader had led the 1-4-Alls on raids against the Dutchies on Thirty-Eighth, against the wops on the other side of Ninth. Shouting “Christ killers!” they’d chased the jewboys coming out of their school on Thirty-Fifth, with only Joey silent, only Joey thinking he was no jewboy like those Hebrew school jewboys. Silent was Next Leader, silent. He felt better when they went after the Dutchies again or swiped fruit from Paddy’s Market on Ninth. There, every Saturday night, the horse and wagon peddlers lined the curbs. Saturday afternoons, the 1-4-Alls would sit in the Eighth Avenue nickelodeons, watching Pearl White escape the clutching hand as the pianist hit the keys and an usher sprayed cheap perfume to kill the stink of the sleeping bums. They all loved Pearl White and Angelo said when he was a man he’d marry her. “Marry this!” they hooted, goosing him, itchy with the lusts of their adolescence. And in the cellars and on the roof tops, they lined up one behind the other, waiting their turn at the little sluts of the tenements. It was easier finding girls when they had their own clubhouse.