Life and Death of a Tough Guy (3 page)

Their clubhouse was a backyard shed. It was also their true home, their inner city, the secret ghetto of their youth.

KEEP OUT, some long ago proprietor had painted in white on the 1-4-All shed door. And in fading yellow paint another former occupant had notified everybody: J. RIORDAN PRIVIT. Underneath the misspelled PRIVIT, there was a legend in dark red: 1-4-ALL CLUB. That winter evening, behind their locked door, Georgie, Joey, Angelo and Fats sat smoking in the tiny yellow glow of a candle. On a shadowy shelf there was a cigar box full of cigarette butts retrieved from every avenue on the West Side; Sweet Caporals from in front of the pool parlors on Eighth, fancy Helmars and Hassans picked up outside the Broadway cafes. Next to the box was a carved wooden ship, its hull stained black out of a bottle of stolen shoe polish with a single mast whose white sail had been scissored out of some housewife’s missing pillowcase. On that white sail, Fats, the best letterer in school, had printed 1-4-All in square black-ink letters. Without a keel or a rudder that ship could only have sailed on an adolescent’s faraway and dreamy seas.

Now in the smoky shed, Georgie was saying, “We’ll raid that greaseball tomorrer!”

They all nodded. Yeh, raid him and teach him a lesson for being such a tightwad! The Greeky frankfurter man! The stingy greaseball! All they’d asked him the other day was to trust them for a coupla lousy pennies and he wouldn’t do it. So they sat smoking and planning in the candle-lit wintery darkness with their dream ship on the shelf above their heads.

And outside in the backyard, the old newspapers whirled round and round between the sheds and the fences like crazy prisoners, wearing the crazy black and white of that year’s newsprint:

Outside was the huge and waiting world that the German Kaiser wanted for
Deutschland Uber Alles
while Becker, the New York police lieutenant, had only wanted to line his pockets with a little graft.

But all Joey Kasow wanted was to belong to the 1-4-Alls. West Side, East Side, all around the town, all that any of the kids in the kid gangs wanted was to belong.

The next day, toward evening, they found the Greek frankfurter man on his usual corner. He stared frightened at the crowd of boys with snowballs in their mittened hands. A lank dark man, the Greek, a brown scarf wrapped around his skinny neck, his long nose drooping over a thick black mustache. His frankfurter pushcart was as rundown as he was:

FRANKFURTERS 2c

SAUERKRAUT, MUSTARD

A charcoal fire under the iron plate kept the franks red hot. The Greek stared; he sensed disaster; he shouted for help. The first snowballs thudded into his body, his face.

“Raid the greaseball!” Georgie bellowed and sprinting close to the cart, he knocked the mustard pot to the sidewalk. A dozen 1-4-Alls charged, whooping and yelling like the redskins in the nickelodeons. They snatched at the frankfurters, the Greek hitting at their hands. But there were too many hands.

Nobody stopped them on that winter corner. One or two storekeepers watched from inside their doors, afraid to interfere, afraid the kids would return on another evening and smash their plateglass. Laced with frost, those store windows, an icy night coming on, and outside in the steely blue winter a grown man crying like a baby. “Help, help!” the Greek frankfurter man called. “Help! Poleese!” Calling, sobbing, he rushed at the boy who had led the raid, the biggest boy of them all. He seized Georgie by the collar of his mackinaw. Georgie kicked him in the leg, but still the Greek held on, punching with his free hand. The 1-4-Alls’s piled on the Greek, knocking him off his feet, but still he held onto Georgie. The two of them tumbled into the gutter. Still the Greek held on as if his fingers had frozen tight.

“Get the greaseball!” Joey commanded and whipping forward, he kicked at the Greek’s head. The booting feet of a half dozen boys made the Greek let go. The gang dashed around the corner. Now the storekeepers came out of their stores and picked up the bleeding and unconscious man.

And if Joey Kasow lay awake in the bedroom he shared with his kid brother, Danny, who was to know. And if his eyes filled with tears over a no-good tightwad greaseball, who was there to see.

Down on the street nobody had seen Joey Kasow cry in a long long time.

Down on the street, the street of the raiders….

There where Becker the police lieutenant had been the silent partner of a gambler called Rosenthal. On orders from the reform police commissioner, Becker had to raid his partner’s place. “I was doublecrossed. Becker was my partner,” the gambler had written to the newspapers. Hired killers had shot him dead on Forty-Third Street off Broadway outside the Metropole Café. Their names were Gyp the Blood, Dago Frank, Leftie Louey and Whitey Louis. They were all electrocuted, with their employer.

“Imagine a policeman hiring killers!” people had said all over the country, more excited over a cheap gambler’s murder than the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in Serbia. Where was Serbia anyway and who cared. Soon, on all the streets of the land, marching doughboys would be chanting “Hang the Kaiser!” Soon, there would be war and war would drag in on its bloody dragging skirts a freak with two heads looking in two opposite directions, talking out of two mouths, that men would call Prohibition. Soon the slum gangs — Five Pointers, Hudson Dusters, Badgers — scratching out a hard-working dishonest living, existing from pickpocket hand to plug-ugly mouth, would be riding de luxe, coast to coast, on the Bootleggers’ Special.

• • •

“There’s some good kids comin’ up. From Fortieth, you got Billy O’Connor and Red Riley. There’s Billy Muhlen on Thirty-Eight’. And Georgie Connelly and a jewboy, name of Joey Kasow, on Thirty-Sevent’.”

This was Spotter Boyle talking, and next to Clip Haley the Spotter was the biggest man in the Badgers. Clip was the roughneck leader, Kid Knucks himself. The Spotter wasn’t much use in a brawl. His heart, as everybody in the gang knew, was on the blink. But the Spotter had a pale blue eye on him that could case a store in a minute flat. Was the money in the cash register? Or hidden in a sock? That was the kind of thing the Spotter was A-1 at. Sizing them up — whether they were Ninth Avenue storekeepers or the tough kids coming along in every block.

“A jewboy?” Clip Haley asked unbelievingly. They were talking it over in a saloon. Clip was drinking boilermakers, a shot of rye washed down with a beer; the Spotter was sticking to beer. “We never had one in the Badgers!”

“Some of them foreigners got the Irish beat,” Spotter Boyle had to admit as if his old man and old lady hadn’t come over in the steerage themselves. “If the guy’s good, what the hell?”

“You’re a queer one, Spotter.”

He could’ve said that one again. The Spotter’d popped up out of nowhere nine, ten years ago. The Badgers were all Hell’s Kitchen boys, Manhattan born and bred, but the Spotter was from Brooklyn somewhere. Nobody knew him from a hole in the ground, and there he was with a story of an old miser across the bridge who kept his money in the house. Johnny Burke, the Badger leader then, had smelled a rat. Who the hell was the long beanpole with the skinny face anyway? He wasn’t much to look at but when they followed his pointing finger there was more than a thousand in cold cash. That gave the Spotter his nickname and made him a bona fide Badger sure enough. And the old miser? Some guys said he was a relative of the Spotter’s. Others said the Spotter came from a big family out there in Brooklyn and was going to parochial school to be a priest when his heart went bad and he began running wild to get even. The Spotter only laughed and said it was all mullarkey. They couldn’t get much out of him, and over the years they’d stopped asking questions. Johnny Burke, who’d given the Spotter his chance was in Sing Sing. Boxcar Johnson, the new leader had been killed in a fight over a woman. There weren’t many Badgers left, only Clip and a couple others, who had been in the gang nine, ten years ago.

“Why don’t you get a Greek for the Badgers?” Clip was asking now with a sarcasm heavy as a piece of leadpipe.

“Just a jewboy this time, Clip.”

A couple nights later, he brought Joey Kasow and Georgie Connelly up to Clip’s furnished room. The Badger leader let them in, he sat down again, putting his shiny brown buttoned shoes up on the table. Clip’s sandy hair was perfumed, his rocky jaw powdered. A golden horseshoe tie-pin shone in his necktie. “Who’s the jewboy?” Clip asked, playing a game of cat-and-mouse and turning toward Georgie who was black smoky Irish as even a blind man could see. “You?”

“Me?” Georgie was amazed down to the core of his pugnose soul.

Clip had to laugh. The Spotter flopped down on the double bed in the room; the Spotter was a great one for resting. “It’s the Bum Ticker,” he would explain, as if his heart were a living and separate thing following him around like a kid brother nobody wanted.

“Then it’s you,” Clip said to the second fifteen-year-old. He saw a kid who, although two inches shorter than Kid Irish, was five foot seven or eight and solidly built. The kid’s hair was dark blond under his cap, his round face on the small side, all his features neat, the nose narrow and straight over a mouth like a girl’s with only the jaws strong and square.

“He don’t look like a jewboy,” Clip announced. “Some mick must’ve corked up his ol’ lady on a dark night. Didja say your name was Kasow or Kelly?” Clip roared at his joke, Georgie laughed while the Spotter watched them all like a hawk.

The kid’s gray eyes hadn’t wavered, his face hadn’t changed, and for the first time Clip felt that the Spotter hadn’t gone off the deep end about picking a jewboy for the Badgers.

Nothing that Clip could have said would’ve fazed Joey. Was Clip saying dirty things about his mother? Enough that a guy who was somebody big was knocking his name around.

They became Badgers. They were somebody now. Badgers! The Spotter started them in on the department stores. Work good enough for young punks. Rosie Mafetti, the Spotter’s girl, taught them the little things a good shoplifter has to know. “Always keep your face innercent,” she advised them, who had long lost her own innocence. “When you’re goin’ to the counter be sure the store bull ain’t around. Stick close to some woman what’s shoppin’ like you’re with her. And wear hats, youse guys. Real hats, not them caps from Nint’ Avenoo.” She demonstrated the sleight of hand so necessary in the profession. “A quick swipe, see! And only swipe stuff that fits in your hand. No pianos!” Rosie had them practice on the bottles of perfume on her dresser. And when the lesson was over, she smiled at their flushed faces. “Don’t let the Spotter ever catch you lookin’ at me like that, youse guys.”

One day they would work R. H. Macy’s on Thirty-Fourth Street and Broadway, the next, Gimbels on Thirty-Third. It was at Gimbels’ necktie counter that they were almost caught. Joey noticed the bull slipping in on them through the crowd of men. “Cheese it!” he hissed in warning. They edged away quick from the shoppers busily ferreting out the bargains that surely had to be on the bottom. They moved fast, so fast that the bull quit approaching them like a pickpocket, sneaky and without elbows. Straight at them, the law rushed. They ran, big Georgie in the lead, socking at any woman who didn’t get out of his way. The store blew up with noise like a crazy balloon, with a shrieking and a screaming. A tight mad grin showed on Georgie’s face. He seemed to have forgotten that a bull was hot after them, as if he’d been dropped into a gym where all the targets were soft faces and softer bellies.

The newspapers printed a story about two shoplifters who had run amok.

“They’re a coupla fightin’ fools,” the Spotter said to Clip.

“They should have work where they can be tough as they want.”

Their next job was plumbers. It was a famous cold winter, that winter of 1917. The tenement plumbing, new in the year of another war, in 1898, began to give way. The water in the pipes froze, the pipes cracked, the plumbers were busy around the clock. They went after the plumbers at night, led by a Badger two or three years older than they were, a heavy muscled blonde kid of seventeen with a pair of mitts on him like two bricks. His name was Moore but the Badgers had nicknamed him Bughead because he’d go bugs one drunk out of three and start wrecking things.

That night they met Bughead on the corner of Thirty-Ninth Street and Ninth Avenue. The black pillars of the El lifted up into a sky of white polished stars shining like the glass Christmas stars put away now for another year. Their breath was steam, they kept their gloved hands inside their mackinaw pockets. They crossed under the El tracks, hurried down Thirty-Ninth. The sidewalks were empty with only a slow-footed two-footed whiskey barrel rolling homewards from the saloons, so drunk he seemed to be strolling in the springtime. “We could roll him, Bug,” Joey whispered to Bughead.

“Not tonight,” Bughead said.

They passed the wobbling drunk and Joey laughed, he didn’t know why. But on these winter streets he felt as if he could do anything he wanted, knock over any man for his dirty money, pull any woman into a doorway. He thought of Rosie Mafetti and the long dark street suddenly seemed to glow with the memory of her. The flashing emerald eyes of a slinking cat were her eyes; the deepest shadows, her black hair. Behind all the yellow windows, she was waiting for him, naked in the winter night, and if not her, another like her, prettier….

Into the tenement spotted for them by Spotter Boyle, walked the three Badgers, silent, treading softly. The cellar door in the rear was open. Bughead called, “Hey plumber!” He descended the wooden cellar stairs. They groaned under his heavy step. “Hey, plumber, the landlor’ wants yuh over 418 Fortieth Street right away. The pipes all busted there. 418 Fortieth,” he kept repeating while Joey listening to the ominous creaking of those stairs wondered what kind of warning did a God damn plumber have to work.

Sometimes the plumber would lift a face shadowy and suspicious in the light of his candle. Sometimes the plumber would joke and ask if it was zero out in the street. But once the Bughead had his wrestler’s grip on him, with Georgie pounding down, a hunk of leadpipe in his fist, it’d be over in jig time. With no one to hear a shout for help, or if anyone heard, no one with the nerve to unbolt and unlock his door to come hunting trouble. In the winter night, in the Hell’s Kitchen night, the shouters for help were like the doomed in hell.