No Beast So Fierce (4 page)

I walked the boulevard, window-shopped—and saw that my dressout suit, with cuffed and pleated trousers, was an anachronism. I loved clothes—perhaps through some insecurity—but forced down a rising hunger with the thought that they would come with work and patience. Those who had the things I desired had been striving for them while I vegetated in prison. Only crime would allow me to catch up overnight, and that was out of the question. In many ways I'd never catch up. I accepted that reality.

3

T
HE
automobile that double-parked and honked aroused stares of disapproval from several pedestrians, but made me grin. Willy hadn't changed. He bought wrecks for fifty dollars, tinkered until they moved, and when they gave out he abandoned them. This one had a dead headlight, an asthmatic motor, and a broken muffler.

Willy's wife and two sons were in the car. I'd known Selma since she was eleven and I was fourteen. I'd met Willy at her house; her sister was my first girl friend. The boys had been babies when I last saw them. It was odd that Willy brought the family. It was as if they were a shield. He had no reason to fear me, but in the criminal world (Willy was more drug addict than criminal) there are many guilts and fears. Constant suspicion is good for survival. Willy had a reason—and all I could think of was that his brother had turned stool pigeon three years before. He might have fears that someone would use him as a surrogate for revenge.

“I didn't believe it was you,” he said when I was beside Selma. She was carrying a baby in her arms. Considering that Willy had been imprisoned for two years, either the baby was not Selma's or she'd been stupid.

“How're Joe and Mary?” I asked.

“He's back in Folsom on a parole violation.”

“When was that?”

“Two, three months ago.”

“He and Mary broke up anyway,” Selma said.

Joe had been out a year. Word should have come from Folsom but had obviously missed me. Willy explained that Joe had been doing “good”, which was a criminal euphemism for making “good” money illegally. “He beat a possession,” Willy continued, “and by rights it wasn't his shit. He had a dude in his car and the heat gave them the red light. The other dude threw a bag out the window. He got on the stand and cut Joe loose, but the fuckin' narks didn't go for it. They made sure he was violated.”

“Joe had a new car and everything,” Selma said. “Mary could've had it, but she couldn't make the payments.”

Joe's fall was bad luck for me, too. I now remembered the word that he was making a bundle of money. He would have helped me get on my feet. We'd been teen-age crime partners, smoking marijuana, drinking wine, and riding in stolen cars with rhythm and blues honking from the dashboard radio. We'd burglarized together, committing strong armed robberies, and we'd snatched purses. Over the years he'd been incarcerated when I was out, and vice versa. Our styles had also gone separate ways. Where I'd become an active thief—burglar, bandit, forger—he'd become a drug peddler and sometimes pimp. Yet he would have helped me, as I would have helped him.

Willy turned onto the freeway but crawled along the slow lane. At fifty miles an hour the automobile shook violently.

In the quick, flicking shadows I looked at the couple beside me. Willy, as usual, radiated seediness; the best suit became wrinkled and sloppy the moment he put it on. In the odd light it was hard to see Selma clearly, but I did see gauntness and hardness. She'd never been pretty, but in her youth there had been a sensual bloom. That had withered with her arid life.

Beyond downtown, Willy got off the freeway, following boulevards and side streets east through the seamy core of the city. He'd gotten a ticket on the freeway for the missing headlight a few nights earlier and wanted to avoid meeting the same highway patrolman.

One of the boys in the back seat complained to Selma that he was hungry. I'd forgotten them. Now I was ashamed of our casual talk about crime and prison.

“We'll be home soon,” Selma said.

“Where you living?”

“El Monte.”

“With your parents?”

“God, no!” she said. “Mom isn't there anyway … and the house is as bad as on Court Avenue.”

“Grandma's in the nuthouse,” one of the boys piped from the rear, causing Willy to glance back and admonish him not to say it that way. “That's the way
you
said it, dad,” the boy said, feelings hurt.

“Where's Mary?” I asked.

“She lives a couple miles from us.”

“I suppose your father's still wrestling with lettuce and carrots.”

“Sure … and hoarding his money.”

The family lived on Court Avenue in Lincoln Heights when I had met them, in a big, gray frame house. I'd run away from nearby juvenile hall with their older brother, Gino. Even then the house was run-down. Ten years later it had a stench that made one nauseous. The walls were coated with grease and grime, garbage rotted for weeks in the kitchen, trash littered the floors. An exterminator was brought in and removed two barrels of cockroaches. The deterioration had come after the children moved out, the girls to their sorry marriages, Gino to the gutter of dope and jail.

The tragic aspect was that their father was wealthy. An uneducated, dull-witted immigrant, he'd gotten a two thousand dollar insurance settlement in 1932 for losing a thumb and two fingers. He'd bought a four-unit slum dwelling, meanwhile working the fresh produce stand of a market. Property values climbed; he borrowed on what he owned and bought more slum property and kept working. After the severe housing shortage during the war and the postwar boom in Southern California property, he owned three dozen slum buildings, duplexes, triplexes, storefronts.

As he was lucky with money through no virtue (unless miserliness and tenacious drudgery are virtues), he was unlucky with his family through no fault, beginning with his wife, Jessica. Once pretty, she was already fading when I met her. Her husband refused to buy her anything—and she knew he could afford it. She took to barbiturates, then booze, and became a screaming, slovenly shrew, and sometimes withdrew into the private world of schizophrenia.

Gino, the oldest son, had been prettyboy handsome, with a powerful physique and curly hair that fell over his forehead. He became a sneak thief junky who stole from friends and family. He once served a prison term for writing checks on his father. The old man had been given the choice of prosecuting his son or accepting the monetary loss. He prosecuted.

Mary was next … my first girl friend and my favorite in the family—though my taste in women had changed since childhood. She had a tranquil, sweet disposition miraculously untainted by the sordid milieu. Narcotics and crime affected her life but not her basic sweetness. Her naiveté was also her curse, for she lacked the toughness to break clear of the morass. “Nice boys” had never come into the zone occupied by such violent delinquents as her brother, Joe Gambesi, and myself—and our friends. She'd married Joe when she was seventeen. At that time Joe wanted something else from life than crime—but he quickly became what destiny ordained: a dope peddler. It was the sole path he could see to get the material things he craved. His background, too, was bleak. He'd been raised on a pittance of county welfare by a religious-fanatic mother. They'd lived in a single windowless room. Rats sometimes scurried across the floor. The room was rancid from the candles always burning in his mother's private altar. Joe escaped to the streets and never went to school; he could see no reason to. We met when we were fifteen and I was escaped from reform school.

Selma had become pregnant by Willy, married him, and escaped from one pit of misery to another. Willy became a junky, as had his brother, and Gino, and Joe Gambesi, and myself for a while.

One other Pavan child, Georgie, was a shadow in the background. He still lived at home. He was severely retarded and nobody knew what went through his vacant mind. He'd been arrested just once—for being a peeping torn.

A year before I went to prison the old man had bought a modern, ranch-style house on a large lot in El Monte, complete with orange trees in the back yard. Now, according to Selma, it was in the same condition as the house on Court Avenue. I wondered what the neighbors thought.

And the house on Court Avenue was the only place I'd known to call. I wondered if it said something about me.

“Want to stop and see Mary?” Willy asked as we neared El Monte.

“Take us home first,” Selma said. “The boys haven't eaten and I have a headache.”

I silently approved. I wanted to talk to Willy alone, get loaded, and possibly find a woman.

The Darin home was a tiny, cheap bungalow with a dirt driveway. It was on a semi-rural, semi-industrial road where the few ramshackle houses were separated by gravel pits and construction yards.

We waited in the automobile until Selma and the boys were inside.

“Mary?” Willy asked, backing out.

“I'd rather smoke some pot and rip off some cunt.”

“Pot is a cinch and I know a couple hustlin' broads we can call. But that'll take some bread.”

“My bankroll's too light for buying pussy. Can I get some credit?”

Willy laughed. “Man you know how dope fiend hookers are … 100 percent business.”

“Fuck it. How about you. Are you using stuff?”

“I fix once a week, the day after nalline. They can't test you two days in a row.”

“You're working, too. Never thought I'd see it.”

“It's a bitch, riveting aluminum walls on trailers eight fuckin' hours a day.” Grinding monotony was hard on Willy, yet he had no ability to offer for other employment.

“Can you get me a spot there?”

“You're jiving. Man, I know you. You're gonna rip off everything in town.”

“No, I'm hanging up the gloves. I'm going to get a job and settle down.” I wanted to explain more fully—and then saw how burlesque the situation was: a man explaining why he wasn't going to be a criminal. Willy's respect for me, however, was based on my being a criminal, on my ability to steal money, some of which trickled to him. He respected me as the jackal respects the Hon, and profited in the same way.

In East Los Angeles he parked outside a cantina on a dark street of frame houses and machine shops. The rhythm of a mariachi issued from an unseen jukebox. He told me to wait in the car and was gone less than five minutes, returning to throw a small matchbox of marijuana in my lap. “It's free,” he said. “The dude wants me to deal heroin for him. There's a lot of dope fiends in El Monte.”

“Yeah, you'll make a ten-dollar sale and get a ten-year sentence.”

“Yeah, the jivin' motherfuckers give you more time for a cap of heroin than murder.”

We stopped to buy two cans of beer and a package of cigarette papers; then parked under a street light and rolled the dark green flakes into half a dozen skinny cigarettes. We shared one, sucking the fumes deep, occasionally sipping beer. I'd smoked marijuana since my early teens—every day for a long time—but it came into prison so infrequently that this was like the first time, and I've always gotten higher than most persons from marijuana. It was always as if a partially opaque veil—the one of everyday reality—was lifted so I could see things more clearly: the same thing, but as it really was. Color was especially brighter, as if a dirty window had been washed clean. The neon had already entranced me; now it transfixed me as if super-naturally brilliant. Willy turned on a dashboard radio and the music, intricate piano jazz, was so simple to my perceptions that I could pick each note from the air—and almost see it. For no reason except that it bubbled in me, I began to giggle. The world was crystal clear.

“Man, you're stoned,” Willy said.

“Goddam sure am …” but kept laughing. “It's been a long time. This is like cherry kicks.”

“What gets me is this—we've been smokin' pot in the ghetto all our lives, and it used to be the most terrible crime. You never got a break in court if you got busted. Now that all those sons and daughters of senators and shit are smokin' grass and gettin' busted they're changin' the laws. They didn't give a fuck when it was us poor suckers.”

“That's saying something—but we were out of step with the time.”

Willy started the motor and we cruised aimlessly, recalling other days. Soon his brother was mentioned, and Willy cursed him as a “dirty stool pigeon motherfucker—not my brother”. I doubted that Willy's feelings were anywhere near so intense as his words (he was probably saddened), but he knew my feelings about stool pigeons and wanted to disassociate himself from his brother.

A lighted clock in a dry cleaner's window gave the time as 11:40. Sleep was the farthest thing from my mind (fuck sleeping the first night out), yet tomorrow I had to see Rosenthal, find lodging, look for a job. I needed a chemical substitute for sleep.

“Where can we get some bennies?” I asked.

“L&L Red is the only one I know who fucks with them, but he won't be at his pad yet.”

“Is that old freak still around?”

“Worse than ever.”

“Let's make one of those fruiter bars downtown. They drop stimulants like chickens peckin' corn.”

Willy started to protest that we were too likely to get stopped by the police downtown, but finally deferred to me—and I knew it was because it was my first night. I remembered when he'd jump at the chance to go wherever I wanted—when I had a pocketful of money and picked up the tabs.

Main Street was as bright as Hollywood Boulevard. Willy drove slowly while I scanned the teeming sidewalks. Only ground floor businesses were open, pawn shops, hot dog stands, penny arcades, movie theatres showing porno films twenty-four hours a day. Mainly there were the bars, Western, Mexican, Rock and Roll, each with its front door flung wide and the particular style of music cascading forth. I suddenly remembered how the all-night theatres smelled of piss.