Little Boy Blue (34 page)

On the next block, the faces were nearly all
black. The music spewing from the open doorways was rhythm and blues, raising
Alex’s mood, so he popped his fingers and bounced while he walked.

“It’s on the next corner,”
Wedo said.

Although the block showed rampant black
poverty, it also had a form of conspicuous consumption: pimps sat in the
new,
fin- tailed Cadillacs, dark hands with diamond pinky
rings resting on the steering wheels. The flash of the street pimp, crude as it
seems to those preferring understatement, has the same function as the fanning
feathers of the male peacock: it attracts a certain kind of female, telling her
that she can share the Cadillac and have pretty clothes.

It was an issue of pride in stables of
streetwalkers that their old man had the longest, prettiest Cadillac, the
biggest sapphire or diamond (or several), the brightest plumage. The pimps sat
and watched their turn, trying to out-floorshow their brethren.

A block from Central Avenue, amid the
wine-devoured minds and the hopelessness of impoverished old age, was a
nightclub, grossly out of place. Cadillacs filled the parking lot beside it,
and a canopy extended from the entrance to the curb. A uniformed
doorman
was on duty, assisted by youths to provide valet
parking.

“It’s a hangout for high-rolling
pimps, gamblers, and dope dealers,” Wedo said. “Most of ‘em
are
niggers, but a few white boys and Chicanos fall in. They
have good jazz groups sometimes.”

“I wonder how a guy gets chicks to sell
their pussy and give them the money.”

“Quien sabe,
ese?”
Wedo said. “I
guess they make it good to ‘em.”

Alex grunted, dissatisfied. The answer was
oversimplified—but this wasn’t the time to speculate.

When they were thirty yards away, a prewar,
silver Rolls-Royce pulled up. It was the first Rolls-Royce Alex had ever seen.
Exiting first from the right-hand drive side was a tall, slender man who would
be classified Negro only in the United States. His skin was olive, and his hair
had tight curls, not kinks. His beautifully tailored clothes seemed
conservative compared to those worn by the others. What really impressed Alex, however,
was his two women; one black, one white, yet they were a matched pair. He
watched the white girl, who had gleaming raven hair spilling around her bare
shoulders. She wore a simply cut dress of red silk, its hemline falling nearly
to her ankles in the “new look” style of the postwar era. Her
figure was outlined by the clinging material.

Alex and Wedo walked by while the girls stood
waiting for the man to explain something about the car to the attendant. Alex
could smell the girl (she wasn’t much older than himself), and for a
moment their eyes met.

“Those hookers don’t walk the
street, what you bet?” Wedo said. “
Those is
call girls, ese.”

“In a
whorehouse?”

Wedo’s face registered disbelief.
“You’re
jivin’
me. You don’t
know the difference between whores and call girls? They’re all whores,
but call girls make appointments by phone. They live in classy pads out on the
Strip. They make big money… keep that vato pushin’ a Rolls-Royce
and eatin’ filets.”

Alex glanced back while Wedo talked and saw
the raven-haired girl take the pimp’s arm. Alex felt a sharp pang of envy
and desire.
For a long time he would remember her image as an
ideal of beauty, and she would be the focus of longings and fantasies.

“Where are we going?” Alex asked;
they were beyond the canopy.

“Just follow me.”

Wedo led them around the side and through the
parking lot to an alley, dark and foul-smelling with a row of big garbage cans
against the opposite brick wall. Alex heard a bustle of noise and scurrying,
the inevitable rats of the slums.

Ahead was a sheet-metal door with a small
light bulb over it. The rear entrance was less ostentatious than the front. Two
men were in the shadows near it, passing a cigarette back and forth. Alex could
tell it was marijuana from the smell. The sound of music came faintly through
the closed door.

Suddenly Alex stopped. He realized that he
didn’t want to go inside. He didn’t want to be in a room with an
experienced whore and not know exactly what to do. Even if she withheld her
laughter, he would know his own ridiculousness. During the walk he’d
become so interested in the life he saw that his tingling sexual desire had
gone away. He hadn’t even been aware of it.

“What’s happenin’?”
Wedo asked, disconcerted.
“Somethin’
wrong?”

“Let’s split. I don’t wanna
go in there.”

“What, man? Are you crazy?”

“Forget it. Come on.” He started
walking away, and Wedo had to follow. Alex wouldn’t have explained
everything no matter where they were, but in the alley’s quietness the
men by the door would hear every word; they kept him from
talking,
and Wedo from asking, until they were back on the street.

“What happened to you?”

“Too many niggers around,” Alex
lied, deliberately making his voice hard to shut off Wedo’s probes. It
was easier than trying to explain a complex truth he didn’t understand.
As much as anything else in the world (or almost), he wanted to fuck a girl.
Even the imagining of it got his prick hard. He knew what fucking was, the
thing itself, but he was also certain there was more to it than that; he’d
read as much via allusion and euphemism. It didn’t tell him enough to
help, just enough to establish his ignorance. What he needed was a girl near
his own age, as inexperienced as himself, so she wouldn’t know he was
learning.

Without discussion they had automatically
turned back toward Main Street.

“Well, whaddya wanna do?” Wedo
asked.

“I’m following you.”

“Let’s go check Hank out, see if
he’s through,
maybe
cruise around. Say, you ever
roll any fruiters?”

Alex shook his head.

“We can make some bread strong-arming
them.
Me
and Hank have done it before. We pick ‘em
up in a couple of public toilets— one in Pershing Square, the other one
in the P.E. depot on Sixth and Main. One of us goes down and stands at the
pisser, fakin’ like he’s pissing. Just look around, and some
pervert’ll give you the eye. They just wanna suck a dick… anywhere.
So whoever gets one takes him to an alley, or up on Angel’s
Flight,
and whoever is waitin’ follows until the spot
is right. We kick the motherfucker’s ass and take his bread.
You for that?”

Ashamed of backing out at the nightclub, Alex
was anxious to show his guts. “Sure, man, that sounds all right.”
He answered without thinking, not that reflection would have changed his
answer,
it
might have instilled some misgivings,
however.

Hank wasn’t enthusiastic, at least not
for that night. He had a girl to meet and enough money for the moment.

It was nearly midnight when Wedo and Alex
came out of the Examiner building.

“What now?” Wedo said.
“I’m tired.”

“Me, too.
I don’t have anywhere to go.”

“I could go… home,” Wedo
said, but then patted Alex’s back in comradeship.
“If
you could call the nasty motherfucker that.”
He choked the words
out with false levity. “But I don’t feel like it. Lots of times I
don’t.”

“So where do you sleep?”

Wedo shrugged.
“Here
and there.
At Hank’s sometimes. His mother likes me. Sometimes at
Teresa’s… sneak by her father and go upstairs… and sometimes
in an all-night flick on Main Street. Wanna try that?”

“Sure, man.”

Thus was it decided, and in ensuing weeks
they would spend several nights in one triple-feature
movie
theater
or another, always sitting adjacent to an exit in case the cops
who scanned the place from the door started down the aisles. The all-night
theaters closed about six-thirty, dumping their creatures into the daylight and
the rising city, where they were lost amid the swarm.

On the morning following that first night,
they also established another pattern they would repeat. They took an old
yellow streetcar to JoJo’s and Teresa’s, waiting with hands jammed
in their pockets and vapor coming from their mouths until old man Altabella
drove off to work. Alex’s new clothes were in the house. He bathed and
changed while Wedo walked Teresa to school.

JoJo was still snoring when his buddies
showed up, but when Wedo returned from the walk, JoJo was perfecting his
ducktail and was ready to go.

Both Alex and JoJo had money left from the
smoke-bomb caper, so they paid for the marijuana, wine, and the gasoline for
Hank’s car. The quartet drove to the beach, but it was off-season and
bleak and empty. Even the hot-dog stands were shut down. Alex felt good just
riding around in the back seat, looking at things. JoJo was beside him, while
Wedo rode in front with Hank. The wine and weed opened shutters in Alex’s
mind, making him think and feel with unusual intensity. Colors could be felt,
music seen,
each piano note hanging individually before his
mind’s
eye. He knew he would get busted sooner or later and would
have to go back to jail. The awareness of that always lurked on the fringe of
his consciousness. He also knew what most people thought when they looked at
four youths with greasy ducktails and thick-soled shoes: distaste laced with
apprehensiveness. It wasn’t ideal, but it was better that than the way
they fucked him around. He really liked his new buddy, Wedo; Hank, too, except
that the latter was taciturn by nature and hadn’t opened up yet, though a
wink and a grin told Alex he was accepted.

On the drive back to the city, they took
winding Sunset Boulevard. For much of its length it was lined with large,
beautiful homes.

They had various architectural styles, but
white
was
the prevalent color, and they were all
nestled in greenery. All four youths were awed, and when they neared the
turnoff through the Bel Air gates, Wedo wanted to turn in and cruise around.

“It’s a free country, ain’t
it? That’s a public street, que no?”

“Let’s keep going,” Alex
said. “We stand out too much to be cruisin’ around in there.
We’ll get pulled over, sure as shit.
Me
and JoJo
are wanted.”

“We stand out here, too,” Wedo
argued.

“Yeah, but this is a big main drag.
That ain’t the same as up there. First one of those rich people sees us
out the
window,
they’ll call the police about
the zoot-suiters or something. And the cops work for them.”

Wedo finally nodded. “Yeah,
you’re right.”

Being thus
validated, Alex felt even better. He leaned back and scanned the mansions of
Beverly Hills, wondering what the odds were for him to ever have such a place;
how did people get so rich? It was beyond his dreams, which ended
at a
new convertible and sharp clothes—a
double-breasted one-button roll in sharkskin.

That night Wedo borrowed Hank’s car.
They went to a Billy Eckstine concert at the Million-Dollar Theatre. JoJo had a
girl to take, and Wedo had Teresa. Alex didn’t want to go, but on
Wedo’s urging, he dressed up and went along. Eckstine was the favorite
singer in the barrios and ghettos of Los Angeles.

Afterward they went cruising, stopping at a
drive-in for hamburgers, then up into the Hollywood Hills to follow Mulholland
Drive along the winding crest. They could see the city spread out to the far
horizon. Everyone but Teresa smoked marijuana and drank beer. Alex was high,
and as sometimes happened, he suddenly got serious. He wanted to talk about
books and ideas, but he knew before he spoke that nobody was interested. They
wanted a good time and wouldn’t know what he was talking about;
they’d think he was a fool. He felt very lonely as he watched the girls
snuggling up to Wedo and JoJo. He vowed that this situation wouldn’t
happen again.

The situation had no chance to happen again:
JoJo was arrested the next day. He went to a malt shop across from the high
school to wait for the girl he’d taken to the concert. The malt shop was
nearly empty, which was usual until classes were over. Two juvenile detectives
from the local precinct came to see the owner about a recent burglary at the
dry cleaner’s next door. There sat JoJo on a stool. Both detectives knew
him well enough to call his nickname; both also knew he was an escapee.

“JoJo Altabella, as I live and
breathe!” one of them exclaimed cheerily.

When Teresa came in after school, the malt
shop owner told her what had happened. She immediately called home and warned
Alex. He was out the back door and gone through the rear alley five minutes
before the detectives came looking for him. He and Wedo spent that night in a
flop-house hotel on Sixteenth and Main streets. It was the first time Alex had
rented a hotel room, and he really expected the clerk to refuse a
thirteen-year-old, or at least to have questions. But when he eyed them, Wedo
gave him an extra two dollars, and his suspicion became a wink.

Alex became enamored with roaming the city
streets. Within a few days his uncertainty was washed away by the constant
challenge and excitement. Each day opened with the possibility of new adventures.
Wedo was seventeen and, notwithstanding his illiteracy, extremely street-smart.
He’d grown up virtually without supervision, fending for himself in
tough neighborhoods. He had no cognizance of abstract values, or analysis, or
of anything else except how to function on the mean streets. Because of his age
and experience he was the leader, but without his realizing it, Alex was
the
more
violent of the pair. Wedo talked about
violence constantly, and Alex took the word for the reality; he didn’t
know that Wedo’s constant talk was unconscious compensation for the
Catholic religion he overtly rejected but which his mother had deeply
instilled in him while he was still a toddler.

Alex and Wedo committed a variety of crimes,
averaging nearly a felony a day—not counting smoking marijuana—if
anyone wanted to make a tally. They jackrolled homosexuals the way Wedo had
described, enticing them from public restrooms to some dark alley and jumping
them. The scores were meager, never more than thirty dollars, so after four
such robberies they quit that and devised a way to steal the coin box on
streetcars, at least those streetcars with a single motorman-conductor. The
youths would get on separately a stop apart. One stayed near the front; the
other went to the rear. The one in the rear would reach out and disengage the
rod connecting to the overhead electric wires. The streetcar lost power and
stopped. The conductor would go to the rear to deal with the problem. The boy
in front snatched the coin box, leaped out the front and ran. They did this
three times and were smart enough to
stop,
assuming
that pretty soon someone would be waiting for them if they kept it up.
Actually, they needed relatively little money. It was plenty if they had ten
dollars apiece, a few joints, and a bottle of wine— especially if they
were cruising in Hank’s car, looking tough. When that car was unavailable
they hotwired one and joyrided around, never keeping it more than eight hours,
for Wedo knew that license numbers didn’t go on the “hot
sheet” until the shifts changed. In six weeks they stole eight
automobiles.

Their adventures were not always pleasurable.
One night Wedo bought the ticket for an all-night movie on Main Street while
Alex waited in the alley to be let in through an emergency exit. The exit was
in the lobby of the men’s restroom. Alex heard noises inside, became
impatient, and knocked. The door opened, but instead of Wedo it was a uniformed
policeman
with a raised nightstick. Alex whirled and
ran as the club crashed on his right shoulder near his neck, a pain so great
that he scarcely felt the hard kick to the tip of his spine. He sprawled on his
hands and knees and could have been caught if the
policeman
hadn’t been satisfied. The next day Alex could hardly move his arm, and
the entire shoulder area was purple. It was months before he could lift his arm
straight over his head without pain. Everything in his life showed him the
primacy of violence.

In this postwar time, only the first waves of
the human sea had come to Los Angeles, and the San Fernando Valley was just a
few communities surrounded by citrus groves and alfalfa. But the city was
already an immense sprawl. Its poorer citizens already inhabited the older and
seamier central and east side areas. Circumstances pretty much kept Alex in
these poorer environs. He didn’t truly appreciate the different worlds as
divided by money. If anything, he found the poor quarters to be where he was
less affected and more willing to accept things—or maybe it was because
Wedo knew people who thought nothing amiss in a pair of youths running loose,
and those were the people Alex met. Every day was an adventure, and Alex
enjoyed just seeing things. One evening at dusk they abandoned a stolen car
near Alameda Street, in the middle of a vast scrap yard. Everything was old,
impregnated with grime and rust, all the colors dull and gray, a world of monochrome.
Alex followed Wedo over a board fence. It was a shortcut to Wedo’s
neighborhood to cross this immense yard of scrap metal. The hush of dusk was
upon the place. Alex was awed and fascinated by the mountainous piles of
castoff automobiles; they loomed to create a skyline. He got the same feeling
in the railroad yards, seeing one hundred pairs of tracks filled for miles by
dusty boxcars. It was a sense of something for which words were inadequate. It
was akin to the awe most persons feel at the grandeur of nature. It was not the
same feeling but a maimed cousin thereto.

A night finally came where Wedo had to go
home and they had no money for the cheap hotel room. The hour was past
midnight. Earlier it had rained, and there was the kind of wind that usually
precedes more.

“No jive,” Wedo said. “I
got the runny shits and I’m weak.” Though the night was cool, beads
of sweat were on his forehead.

“You don’t look good,” Alex
said.

“If Hank had been there, he coulda
drove you to San Pedro. Teresa said it was cool.”

“What about a streetcar?”

“They stopped running at
midnight.”

“Don’t worry about me, man.
I’ll be okay.”

“It might start raining. You gotta get
in somewhere. If the fuzz sees you—bam! You’re dusted.”

“Maybe I should find
some fruiter to take me home,” Alex said, half-joking.

A wrinkled mask of disgust was Wedo’s
response.

“I know,” Alex said.
“Besides, we got ‘em terrorized. The word’s gone around. I
can see some of ’em lookin’ at us funny. They heard a description,
I’ll bet.”

“You don’t wanna do that
anyway.”

“It’s better than
pneumonia… or getting busted. Anything is better than that. I just wanna
get in somewhere.”

Wedo snapped his fingers, “I know a
spot… close to my pad, too. C’mon.”

They left fifteen cents for the two coffees
and started walking. The place Wedo knew of was the basement of an apartment
building. “There’s some old couches and shit stashed down there.
You can make it one night.”

The building was two stories high and spread
along half a block. It was two blocks from Wedo’s home. It was a building
for the poor, as was everything in this neighborhood.

“Around back,” Wedo said.

They turned into the total darkness of an
alley. Behind the apartment house was an unpaved parking lot. It was very
dark, totally black against the building, though someone there could see movement
and some shape
looking
out. They kept silent, Wedo
leading him by touch.

The building jutted out in wings, creating a
“U” shape. The basement door was at the base of the
“U.” As they reached it, the loudest sound they heard was their
breathing. In the stillness they could clearly hear passing cars half a block
away. Wedo tugged Alex close and whispered, his mouth an inch from Alex’s
ear. “Light a match. It’s loose on the frame and a catch lock.
It’ll take one second.”

Alex leaned close, shielding the glow. Wedo
had his pocket knife ready. The moment the match flashed so he could see
exactly where the catch was, he jabbed in the knife point, pried, and tugged.
Indeed, it was faster than turning a key.

The door squeaked and Wedo hissed between his
teeth. Now they were in absolute darkness. Alex lighted several matches before
they went down the creaky stairs. More matches showed a room fifteen- feet
square.

“Nothing here but cobwebs,” Alex
said softly.

“Oh, man, I was down here three months
ago and they had it over there.”

A padlocked door was at one end; breaking
through it was out of the question.

“Let’s split,” Alex said.
“Fuck this place.”

“We’ll think of something.”

On thieves’ feet they ascended the
wooden stairs, Wedo in front.

They pushed the door partially open. Ten feet
ahead to the left was a wooden stoop outside a screen door. The screen door
squeaked. It sounded to them like a scream. A bulky figure started out, his
white undershirt a lighter shadow. Wedo bolted instantly and wordlessly.
He had to run in front of the man to get out of the “U.” Alex was
still hidden and unseen in the doorway’s blackness.

The figure stepped on the porch. His hand
came up as Wedo went by. “Freeze, goddammit!” he bellowed.

Alex spurted out, lunged three steps, and hit
the revolver before the man could shoot.

“Run, Alex!” Wedo
yelled,
his voice already distant.

It was useless, for a grip too strong held
him, and there was the terrifying sound of a revolver cocking next to his head.

“Don’t move or you’re
dead,” the man said.

A moment later his wife was in the screen
door with a flashlight.

“I called ‘em,” she said.
“You got one… my God, he’s just a kid.”

“He’s a punk.”

“Your mother’s a punk,”
Alex snarled, tears of frustration and pain forming. It almost felt good when
the man backhanded him. The strong blow made him think of physical pain, not
the worse kind that had been rising.