Seduction of the Innocent (10 page)

“Mr. Price,” Frederick said with nasty pleasantness, “I just want to tell you in person that I find reprehensible what you’re doing to today’s youth.”

The sight of the doctor and the sound of his German-inflected condemnation broke through the torpor of the Dexie crash, and Bob Price came alive. It was as if that other doctor, Frankenstein, had thrown a switch and sent electricity pulsing through the publisher’s dead flesh, reanimating it.

“You
lied,
you son of a bitch,” Price spat at him.

“I would
expect
that kind of language from a peddler of filth,” the psychiatrist said, sneering.

“You bastard...”

I was tugging Price along, but he was fighting me.

Frederick, raising his voice, reporters circling like the vultures they were, said, “My book
Ravage the Lambs
is about to appear, gentlemen, and perhaps you aren’t aware that it’s been chosen as a Book of the Month Club selection.”

Price snarled, “You used artwork from
my
comics without permission! I’m going to sue you. I’ll get an
injunction!”

“Gentlemen,” Frederick said to the reporters, “you are my witnesses! This is the sinister hand of a corrupter of children threatening to prevent the distribution of my book... because it exposes him as the father of juvenile delinquents across our great nation.”

Price was doing his best to squirm out of my grasp. “I’ll
kill
you, you bastard! I’ll
kill
you, so help me God!”

But before Price could strangle the smirking shrink in front of dozens of witnesses, I regained my purchase on his arm and dragged him through the crowd and outside. His energy was soon drained and when I got him into the convertible, he quickly fell asleep.

Not a restful sleep on our drive back to Lafayette Street, no. Filled with nightmares.

Monsters, no doubt. With German accents and white lab coats.

Early evening and it seemed like everybody and his dog was on the street in Harlem, from “high-yaller” whore to good church-going lady, from bow-tie businessman to toothless derelict. Raucous music bled from bars and clubs, and the smell of fried food wafted. Laughter, high and hearty, cut across traffic sounds, but so did angry yells. This was that big multi-colored neon-washed canvas called Harlem—110th, 116th, 125th, and 135th Streets, Seventh Avenue, Lenox Avenue, the west side of Fifth Avenue from 110th up— bustling, pulsing, threatening, vulgar, poetic.

Time was when a downtown “ofay” like me came up here to dig the jazz at Birdland or maybe dance at the Savoy. That was back when side-street after-hours joints flourished by ignoring New York’s candy-ass legal closing time of four
A.M
. If I were so inclined, I could tell you of wild nights that ended with me and a date stumbling out of a smoke-filled basement hideaway into unforgiving sunlight.

No more.

In this small section of the city, a population of 700,000, largely colored, made up what one Broadway columnist called “a concentration camp surrounded by the barbed-wire fence of ironclad prejudice.” Scant new housing had been built here in decades, and the deteriorating firetraps where so many lived in squalor and discomfort were largely owned by white millionaires to whom the notion of improving sanitation was almost as funny as the high rents they squeezed out of their piss-poor tenants.

Those who could afford to had long since moved to the Sugar Hill area, or to one of the quiet, respectable tree-shaded streets away from Harlem’s business district, if by business you mean robbery, murder, rape, mugging, prostitution and dope-peddling.

Not that there weren’t respectable merchants and other businesses in Harlem. But the cops shrugged off complaints, and cast a blind eye toward misdemeanors and felonies they personally witnessed. And the newspapers rarely bothered publishing anything about Harlem crime, spiking most items with that address.

A fair share of all that ignored criminal activity was perpetrated by teen gangs, like the Sabers, the Barons, the Chancellors, among others. Such gangs often fought each other for the sheer hell of it—those “rumbles” you’ve heard about—but their life’s blood was robbery, whether purse-snatching or armed hold-ups.

These gangs offered protection, a sense of belonging, walking around money, and in-house “debs,” girls of twelve and up, who kept the boys happy. The temptation for a Harlem youth to join, not to mention the peer pressure, was as overwhelming as Harlem itself.

That’s what Dr. Frederick was up against with his free clinic for troubled kids, operating out of St. Phillip’s Episcopal Church of Harlem.

“As much as I might disagree with his attack on comic books,” Sylvia Winters told me, from the rider’s seat of my convertible, “I admire his overall effort to bring mental health care to the underprivileged.”

I had picked Sylvia up at her apartment and we had plenty of time to talk on the way, between traffic and the scores of blocks between the Village and St. Phillip’s.

The overcast day never paid off with rain, but the evening remained cool, so I kept the top up. Anyway, you have to shout in a top-down convertible, to hold a decent conversation, and I wanted to explore Sylvia’s feelings and opinions about Dr. Frederick before we signed her up to ghost his column.

“Well,” I said, “the doc specifically wanted to meet you up at his free clinic. I’m not sure why.”

“I think I know,” she said.

“Why so?”

She was in another of her bulky sweater and slacks combos, this one a dark blue that hit her eye color dead bang. That platinum hair of hers, in that shortish cut, showed no roots at all. I wondered if she was naturally platinum blonde. I wondered if I’d find out....

“Couple of things,” she said. “Dr. Frederick probably wants to make sure I’m comfortable coming to see him in Harlem—it’s not the friendliest area to a young white woman, you know.”

“Actually,” I said, “it can be way
too
friendly.”

She nodded with a humorless half-smile. “If the doctor and I are working together, I may have to come up there from time to time. He also may hope to enlist me as a parttime volunteer—none of his staff is paid, I understand, and I have a degree, after all.”

“Is that everything?”

She shook her head. “He may be showing off a little. Letting me know Dr. Werner Frederick is more than just a pop psychiatrist who likes to get in the papers and magazines and on TV and radio.”

I grunted a laugh. “That he’s a real, dedicated professional.”

Her expression was thoughtful. “And I think he is. But when he was working as a forensic psychiatrist for the New York courts, he came in contact with a bunch of juvenile offenders, who liked to read comic books.”

“Imagine that.”

“He took a look at some of the more violent comic books, and all that blood on pulp paper was like blood in the water to him.”

“How so?”

“He smelled a subject, a controversy, all his own. And that’s another reason for him to establish his credibility with me.”

“Yeah?”

And another nod. “He knows a good number of mental-health care professionals think he’s as full of crap as a Christmas goose, where funny books are concerned. That his thinking is simplistic, and that his research is...I don’t know how else to say this, Jack...shoddy.”

“How is it shitty?”

“I said ‘shoddy.’”

That had made her smile, but now she hesitated, obviously reluctant to criticize a fellow “mental-health care professional.”

Finally she admitted, “The man has no real data. Just an opinion that comic books in general—which something like ninety percent of children read these days—set a bad example. In Dr. Frederick’s view, there is violence in comic books, and a lot of so-called juvenile delinquents read comic books, therefore comic books cause juvenile delinquency.”

We were at a light in midtown. “Isn’t that one of those false syllogisms they taught me about in college, right before I flunked out?”

H er half-smile was better than a full smile from most females. “Very good, Jack. No, the doctor is just riding the comet of a controversy of his own creation. He
has
no proof.”

“You wouldn’t have thought so at that Senate hearing this afternoon.”

She shrugged. “It’s because the senators, like Dr. Frederick, begin with an anti-comic-book assumption as false as that syllogism. It’s simply bad science.”

“Isn’t that a comic book Entertaining Funnies publishes
—Bad Science
?”

We were moving again.

She leaned back in her comfy, pleated vinyl bucket seat. “Anyway, everything Dr. Frederick says about comic books is based on undocumented anecdotes.”

“But he claims
Ravage the Lambs
is chock full of data.”

“Sure. Such as, if he runs across a comic book with a gory scene of suicide by hanging, he lines it up with a juvenile suicide in his files. Or if a child or adolescent commits a robbery or assault or even a murder, he finds a similar crime in a comic book.”

“A comic book that was a favorite of these bad seeds?”

She shook her head again. “No. Frederick doesn’t bother making that connection, probably because he can’t. Beyond that ‘data,’ it’s just opinion—Wonder Guy uses force to subdue a gangster, Dr. Frederick sees fascism.”

I grinned at her. “And if Batwing lives with his young ward Sparrow, it’s obviously a homosexual relationship.”

“Not to mention pedophilia.”

“I try not.” I honked at a double-parked cab. Guess what good it did. “Then why are you willing to ghost his column for us?”

She was staring out into the geometric abstraction of New York City at night. “Because I think his heart is in the right place, and—beyond this dead comic-book horse he’s flog-ging—a lot of what he’s done, and
is
doing, is enormously positive.”

“And that’s the only reason?”

She smiled at me, vaguely teasing. “Well...maybe I want to work with the Starr Syndicate so I have an excuse to see you, Jack.”

I gave her a leer that wasn’t vague at all. “Or maybe you like the sound of that twenty grand Maggie promised you, if Doc Frederick approves of you.”

“Maybe,” she admitted, with a knowing smirk.

Man, this chickie was as smart as she was beautiful, and I was just enough of a free-thinking man not to hold that against her. Maybe I should marry her. After all, having an in-house shrink might help keep a guy sane, and the extra income would be no hardship. See? Free-thinking.

St. Philip’s Episcopal was a massive brown-brick neo-Gothic affair at West 134th Street, just west of Seventh Avenue, well-known as the biggest church in Harlem with some two thousand members, including Adam Clayton Powell. I left the Kaiser-Darrin locked up tight in the parking lot behind the big church, glad to have it off the street, but went in the front way, where the pastor’s secretary pointed us to the nearby parish house whose basement was home to the clinic.

After the toweringly impressive church, the crumbling brownstone parish house came as a shock. Sole access was down a dingy, garbage-strewn alley. Should I have brought my gun?

After all these years,
I thought,
back in a Harlem basement hideaway
....

A white sign bore the black-lettered words
LAFARGUE CLINIG—WATCH YOUR STEP
, which might have been psychiatric advice or maybe it meant the crumbled-stairs walk-down to a door that was unlocked. I wondered how many winos and armed robbers wandered in here unannounced.

A colored gent in his thirties greeted us; he wore a lab coat like the one Frederick had worn at the hearing today, and a big smile.

“You must be Dr. Winters,” he said. He was mustached and wore glasses and if he’d been any more likable, I’d have bust out crying. “And you must be Mr. Starr. I’m Dr. Tweed.”

We shook hands, and exchanged a few pleasantries. He’d been expecting us, and seemed particularly pleased to be meeting Sylvia, whether because she was a knockout or a fellow shrink, I couldn’t tell you.

“We only have these two rooms,” he said in a resonant baritone, gesturing around him. “We do our best to keep the moisture out, but it’s a losing battle.”

Never mind keeping the moisture out—how about the rats?

But they’d done their best to transform the uninviting space into something pleasant, painting the cement walls white, doing the same with the open wooden rafters, putting down some linoleum. The larger of the two rooms had various play areas for younger children, tables, chairs, toys— blocks, pick-up sticks and dolls for the younger ones, Mr. Potato Head, sliding number puzzles and Matchbox cars for the older ones. Reading material was scattered around, Little Golden Books,
Highlights
magazine, but no comic books, not on your life, not even a
Donald
damn
Duck.

Half a dozen men and women in lab coats supervised— several Negroes, mostly white folks—kneeling to talk to individual children, strictly colored. In one corner, half a dozen teens sat talking with a white shrink, in what appeared to be an informal group session. The smaller room down at the end of the space was for private conferences.

Dr. Frederick was in one of those now.