Sleepers (9 page)

T
HERE ARE FEW
secrets inside the thin walls of a tenement.

Many nights would be spent staring up at a white ceiling, listening to passionate moans coming from a back room or an apartment across the hall. Our parents conducted their sexual lives as openly as they pursued their violent fights. We lived in the midst of a peasant stronghold, bred on foreign soil and lacking in physical inhibitions. Our folks were not, as a rule, liberal-minded, so talk of sex made them uncomfortable. But they would always return a direct question with a direct response.

The apartments were so cramped that private moments were difficult. During the summer, every available window was opened wide, dozens of voices bouncing off the back alleys below. Inside the shabby buildings, the men stripped down to their socks and underwear and women paraded about in bras, slips, and house slippers, shame taking a backseat to comfort.

Winter brought the opposite.

The rooms would turn so bitterly cold, the lack of heat would be so numbing, there was little else to do but huddle together under however many blankets could
be found. We slept sitting up, on chairs, in front of the gas stove which would be left on all night, our stocking feet resting on the open door. You were never alone.

Out on the street, sex was a hot topic. Older guys talked in graphic terms about girls they had seduced, winking as they spoke. Pictures of naked women, ripped from the pages of skin magazines, were regularly passed down the aisles at school.

Michael was the most sexually experienced of the group, which meant that he had kissed a girl on more than one occasion. Since he was the oldest, he was also the only one of us invited to parties where girls outnumbered the boys. Those parties inevitably led to slow walks up the stairs to what was commonly known as tar beach. There, across the rooftops of Hell’s Kitchen, many a neighborhood boy lost his virginity in the arms of an older, somewhat wiser, young woman.

While we attended many such parties, we were still a few years away from any serious sexual activity. If an older woman—which meant anyone older than we were—smiled in our direction, we considered the evening a success. If, on top of that, a jealous boyfriend didn’t throw a punch at us when he caught her smiling, we went home thinking we were as cool as Steve McQueen.

We sought our romantic escapades elsewhere, often in the company of Carol Martinez, twelve, who was as much our friend as she was Michael’s steady. Carol was a Hell’s Kitchen half-breed. She inherited her temper and dark good looks from her Puerto Rican father, while her sarcastic wit and sharp tongue came courtesy of a strong-willed Irish mother who died in childbirth. Carol read books, worked after school in a bakery, and, by and large, kept to herself.

She ignored the pleas of the girl gangs to join their ranks, never carried a weapon, loved westerns as well as sappy love stories, and went to church only when the
nuns forced her to go. Except for her father, Carol wasn’t close to any members of her family and always appeared saddest around the holidays. The mothers of the neighborhood were fond of her, the fathers looked out for her, and the boys kept their distance.

Except for us. She was always comfortable in our company. She stood up to Michael’s quiet authority, was conscious of my youth and Tommy’s sensitivity, and fretted like a nurse over John’s various illnesses. John had asthma and was quick to panic when caught in closed quarters or in any place he felt at a disadvantage, such as swimming far from shore. He also had a digestive defect and could not eat dairy products. He would get severe headaches, strong enough at times to make him drowsy. While John never complained about his health problems, including his minor heart condition, we were very much aware of them and considered them whenever we planned a prank or an outing.

So, while the older kids of Hell’s Kitchen discovered sex on rooftops or in parked cars by the piers or in movie theater balconies, we sought a sense of romance in more traditional places. The five of us would sneak rides on the backs of horse-drawn carriages in Central Park, each taking a turn holding Carol’s hand as the driver made his way around office buildings and apartment houses. We drank hot chocolate and watched older couples skate under the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. We would walk through De Witt Clinton Park late at night, our shadows lit by a full moon, eating ice cream and telling Carol stupid jokes, in the hopes of making her laugh. If she did, she had to pay the laugh back with a kiss. She was a tough room to work, except when John told one of his jokes. Then, Carol would always laugh.

We would go to the circus, staring down from high up in the cheap seats at the long legs and firm breasts of the women who rode on top of the elephants, wondering if they would feel as soft and sexy next to us as
they looked at a distance. We ignored Carol when she said that up close the women would look older than our mothers and be about as attractive.

Then, there were the Ice Capades.

The show would come into Madison Square Garden once a year, with the female skaters using the dressing rooms whose windows faced the 51st Street side of the Garden. The windows were thick and difficult to see through, with a wire-mesh barrier locked over them to prevent anyone from entering. But we weren’t interested in
going
in, we were interested in
looking
in.

Two nights before the show was scheduled to arrive, we would go up to the street-level windows and, using a ratchet screw Michael had taken from his father’s tool chest, would bore small holes into one of the windows. While we worked, Carol reluctantly stood watch. Within minutes, we had four holes in the window, one for each of us to press an eye onto.

On opening night, while crowds of families lined the front of the Garden waiting to see the skaters perform, my friends and I stood outside, bent over the window, one eye in each hole we had made, our mouths open wide, our imaginations running at full throttle, watching two dozen beautiful women, almost naked, get into their skater’s outfits.

“This,” Tommy said with assurance, “is what heaven must be about.”

“In heaven they let you in,” Michael said.

“Or at least give you chairs,” John said.

For the three weeks of the show’s run, my friends and I never missed our chance to see the Ice Capades.

7

W
E WERE WELL
schooled in revenge.

Hell’s Kitchen offered graduate workshops in correcting wrongs. Any form of betrayal had to be confronted and settled. Our standing in the neighborhood depended on how quickly and in what manner the reprisals occurred. If there was no response, then the injured party earned a coward’s label, its weight as great as that of any scarlet letter. Men, boys, women, girls, were shot, stabbed, even killed for a variety of motives, all having to do with the simple act of getting even.

The neighborhood had a long and proud criminal history.

It was the birthplace of some of the more notorious gangs in America—the Gophers, the Gorillas, and the Parlor Mob Boys among them. It was also the home of Battle Annie Walsh, a chain-smoking, quick-tempered woman in charge of a band of female leg breakers. Walsh and her ladies were hired by downtown landlords to collect their past-due rents. On other days they would roam the streets and beat up anybody who caught their perverse fancies. The tabloids referred to Annie’s crew as the Battle Row Ladies’ Social and Athletic Club. The people in the area weren’t as kind.

Hell’s Kitchen also gave birth to three of the more infamous men of the early twentieth century—Cotton Club owner Owney “Killer” Madden, baby-killer Vincent
“Mad Dog” Coll, and Monk Eastman, a shooter who left our streets a wanted man and returned a decorated World War I hero.

Once upon a time, early in its history, Hell’s Kitchen was one of the more peaceful areas of Manhattan, known for its scenic beauty, wide expanses of grassy fields, stately homes, and cobbled streets. Much of it was farmland. It was
the
place for the moneyed crowds of Greenwich Village to spend lazy summer days playing by the water, picnicking under the stars, watching ships sail across the Hudson. Back then, they called it anything but hell.

The tenements and slaughterhouses arrived after the Civil War. Gangs, bringing with them the twin demons of graft and corruption, followed at the turn of the century. As the years passed and gangs grew in number, the violence spread. Riots were routine. Apartment doors were sealed shut with fear, the rattle of the newly constructed passing el trains helping to drown out the sounds of even the loudest gunshots. The neighborhood for which John Jacob Astor once, in 1803, paid a purchase price of $25,000, had, by the 1860s, turned into a dank and disreputable place, to be avoided by all but the desperate.

Out of the rubble of each passing decade rose a leader with a past as colorful as his name.

There was Dutch Heinrich, bossman of the Hell’s Kitchen gang and a forerunner of famed bank robber Willie Sutton. Dutch never used a weapon, oozed charm and sincerity, and stole only from places known to carry large sums of money and securities. He took the Union Trust Company for $99,000 in 1872, using his gifts of bluff and blarney.

“One Lung” Curran was considered the best brawler ever to walk the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, this despite the fact that he was a tubercular and couldn’t go more than fifteen minutes without spitting up thick wads of blood. Dr. Thomas “Lookup” Evans was an ex-con
turned abortionist who took care of any brothel hooker who found herself pregnant. He committed suicide, allegedly after one of his abortion attempts ended in a woman’s death.

Martin “Bully” Morrison was the first self-anointed king of Hell’s Kitchen. He and his two sons, Jock and Bull, preyed on neighborhood Catholics, stealing everything from their pocket money to the chalices in their churches, out of which they greedily drank down buckets of beer.

By the time Owney Madden arrived to lay claim to his criminal throne, a sturdier brand of order had been restored to the streets. During Madden’s reign, which stretched across the 1920s and ’30s, more than 300,000 people lived in the area, mostly newly arrived German and Irish immigrants. The majority found work along the suddenly expansive waterfront, loading and unloading cargo inside the bellies of an endless supply of ships that fed into the harbor. Others sought work in the slaughterhouses that still dotted the neighborhood, killing cattle, goats, and pigs for low wages and one two-pound package of take-home meat a week. Still others opened saloons and diners, which would serve as watering holes and haunts for the laborers and their families.

Proceeds from each business made their way into Madden’s pockets, in return for which he introduced the rules that kept the neighborhood in line. He helped turn it into a place where families could live, a place that was safe to everyone except strangers.

Johnny “Cockeye” Dunn took over after Madden’s time passed. Under his leadership, the underground economy of Hell’s Kitchen thrived, fed by stolen goods from all areas of the city. Prime cuts of meat and fresh fish were available at bargain prices. Off-the-rack jackets and slacks, price tags still visible, hung seductively in open trunks parked in friendly warehouses. Henchmen like Big John Savona took orders for shoes and
leather belts, shipments that were hand delivered on the last Thursday of every month.

There was always work to be had in Hell’s Kitchen and the age of the employee was never a serious consideration. The better-paying jobs were illegal. In a neighborhood where fathers were always late with the rent or behind on loan shark payments, kids went for the easy money, dropping off paper bags at the precinct house or picking up numbers at the end of the day.

Petty larceny among the Hell’s Kitchen young also had its historical roots. At the turn of the century, children were sent out by their parents to steal coal and wood from the nearby rail yards and docks. Lifting the wallets of sailors on shore leave was a practice passed down from one generation to the next. Walking across town to steal groceries from the better-stocked markets was a habit that persevered well into the 1950s.

Corruption was a way of life in Hell’s Kitchen and no profession was left unblemished. There were three resident doctors who worked the neighborhood, each making house calls on a regular basis. The fees, $5 or $10 depending on the doctor, were paid in cash. The insurance claim that was then filled out and signed by both the doctor and one of our parents listed the fee as $30. When the check arrived from the insurance company, the doctor was given a cut of the action. Again, in cash. The same practice, only in different form, held true for the pharmacists and dentists who worked the area.

“I saw the doctor at least once a week,” Tommy once told me. “When I was sick and when I wasn’t. He’d come over, sit at the kitchen table, have a cup of coffee, a piece of cake, and figure out what was wrong with me. Half the time he didn’t even check me out. It was a great system. My mother would buy groceries from her end of the insurance money and the doctor
eventually bought a house with his. Makes you wonder why they ever gave up house calls.”

From the youngest age, a Hell’s Kitchen child was told it was wrong to steal from anyone who lived in the neighborhood. The church was also sacred ground. Street muggings were rare, and the price for attacking an elderly person was steep.

Rumor circulated about one tough guy who robbed an old lady. He didn’t hit her, just took her purse and the eight dollars it held. Word got out and the mugger was found. He had both his arms and legs broken and two fingers of each hand were removed. After that, when kids saw old ladies in the street, they
gave
them money. There were rules on those streets. Serious rules.

When my friends and I were young, Hell’s Kitchen was run by a man named King Benny.

In his youth, King Benny had been a hit man for Charles “Lucky” Luciano and was said to have been one of the shooters who machine-gunned “Mad Dog” Coll on West 23rd Street on the night of February 8, 1932. King Benny ran bootleg with “Dutch” Schultz, owned a couple of clubs with “Tough Tony” Anastasia, and owned a string of tenements on West 49th Street, all listed in his mother’s name. He was tall, well over six feet, with thick dark hair and eyes that never seemed to move. He was married to a woman who lived outside the neighborhood and had no children of his own.