I was in the last row of boys, left arm resting on the edge of the pew, right hand in my jacket pocket, fingers wrapped around the found clacker. To a nun, a clacker was the equivalent of a starter’s pistol or a police whistle. In church, it was used to alert the girls as to when they should stand, sit, kneel, and genuflect, all based on the number of times the clacker was pressed. In the hands of a nun, a clacker was a tool of discipline. In my pocket, it was cause for havoc.
I waited until the priest at the altar, white-haired and stoop-shouldered, folded his hands and bowed his head in silent prayer. I squeezed the clacker twice, the signal for the girls to stand. Sister Timothy Morris, an overweight nun with tar-stained fingers and a crooked smile, shot up in her seat as if hit by a bolt. She quickly clacked once, returning the confused girls to their seats. I clacked four times, getting them to genuflect. Sister Timothy clacked the girls back into position, shooting a pair of hateful eyes across the rows of pews filled with boys.
I gave the clacker three quick hits and watched the girls stand at attention. The priest at the altar cut short his prayer, casually watching the commotion before him, listening as the echoes of the dueling clackers bounced off the walls of the church. The boys kept their eyes rooted to the altar, holding their smiles and silencing their snickers. Sister Timothy clacked the girls back to their seats, her cheeks visibly red, her lips pursed.
Father Carillo slid into my row, one hand holding on to my left elbow.
“Let me have the clacker,” he said without turning his head.
“What clacker?” I asked, doing the same.
“Now,” Father Carillo said.
I took my hand out of my jacket pocket, moved the clacker across my knees, and palmed it over to Father Carillo. He took it from me without much body movement, each of us glancing over toward Sister Timothy, hoping she had not noticed the quick pass-off.
The priest spread his arms outward and asked all in attendance to rise. Sister Timothy snapped her clacker three times and watched as the girls rose in unison, nodding her head in approval at the two nuns to her left.
“Let us pray,” said the priest.
Father Carillo, his back straight, his eyes focused on the altar, his face free of emotion, gave the clacker in his hand one soft squeeze.
The girls all sat back down. Sister Timothy fell into her pew. The priest at the altar lowered his eyes and shook his head. I looked over at Father Bobby, my mouth open, my eyes unable to hide their surprise.
“Nuns are such easy targets,” Father Bobby whispered with a wink and a smile.
HELL’S KITCHEN WAS a neighborhood with a structured code of behavior and an unwritten set of rules that could be physically enforced. There was a hierarchy that trickled down from the local members of both the Irish and Italian mobs to a loose-knit affiliation of Puerto Rican numbers brokers and loan sharks to small groups of organized gangs recruited to do a variety of jobs, from collections to picking up stolen goods. My friends and I were the last rung on the neighborhood ladder, free to roam its streets and play our games, required only to follow the rules. On occasion, we would be recruited for the simplest tasks, most of them involving money drop-offs or pickups.
Crimes against the people of the neighborhood were not permitted, and, on the rare occasions when they did occur, the punishments doled out were severe and, in some cases, final. The elderly were to be helped, not hurt. The neighborhood was to be supported, not stripped. Gangs were not allowed to recruit anyone who did not wish to join. Drug use was frowned upon and addicts were ostracized, pointed out as “on the nod” losers to be avoided.
Despite the often violent ways of its inhabitants, Hell’s Kitchen was one of New York’s safest neighborhoods. Outsiders walked its streets without fear, young couples strolled the West Side piers without apprehension, old men took grandchildren for walks in De Witt Clinton Park, never once looking over their shoulders.
It was a place of innocence ruled by corruption. There were no drive-by shootings or murders without reason. The men who carried guns in Hell’s Kitchen were all too aware of their power. Crack cocaine had yet to hit, and there wasn’t enough money around to support a cocaine habit. The drug of choice when I was a child was heroin, and the hard-core addicts numbered a handful, most of them young and docile, feeding their needs with cash handouts and petty thievery. They bought their drugs outside the neighborhood since dealers were not welcome in Hell’s Kitchen. Those who ignored the verbal warnings, wrote them off as the ramblings of pudgy old men, paid with their lives.
One of the most graphic images I can recall from my childhood is of standing under a streetlight on a rainy night, holding my father’s hand and looking up at the face of a dead man, hanging from a rope, his face swollen, his hands bound. He was a drug dealer from an uptown neighborhood who had moved heroin in Hell’s Kitchen. A packet of it had killed the twelve-year-old son of a Puerto Rican numbers runner.
It was the last packet the dealer ever sold.
FRIENDSHIPS WERE AS important as neighborhood loyalty. Your friends gave you an identity and a sense of belonging. They afforded you a group you could trust that extended beyond the bounds of family. The home lives of most of the children in Hell’s Kitchen were unruly and filled with struggle. There was little time for bonding, little attention given to nurturing, and few moments set aside for childish pleasures. Those had to be found elsewhere, usually out on the street in the company of friends. With them, you could laugh, tell stupid jokes, trade insults and books, and talk about sports and movies. You could even share your secrets and sins, dare tell another person what you thought about important childhood issues such as holding a girl’s hand.
Life in Hell’s Kitchen was hard. Life without friends was harder. Most kids were lucky enough to find one friend they could count on. I found three. All of them older, probably wiser, and no doubt smarter. There is no memory of my early years that does not include them. They were a part of every happy moment I enjoyed.
I wasn’t tough enough to be part of a gang, nor did I care for the gang members’ penchant for constant confrontation. I was too talkative and outgoing to be a loner. I lived and survived in a grown-up world, but my concerns were that of a growing boy—I knew more about the Three Stooges, even Shemp, than I did about street gangs. I cared more about a trade the Yankees were about to make than about a shooting that happened three buildings down. I wondered why James Cagney had stopped making movies and if there was a better cop in the country than Jack Webb on Dragnet. In a neighborhood where there was no Little League, I worked on throwing a curveball like Whitey Ford. Surrounded by apartments devoid of books, I pored through the works of every adventure writer the local library stocked. Like most boys my age, I molded a world of my own and stocked it with the people I came across through books, sports, movies, and television, making it a place where fictional characters were as real to me as those I saw every day. It was a world with room for those who felt as I did, who hated Disney but loved Red Skelton, who would take a Good Humor bar over a Mister Softee cone, who went to the Ringling Brothers circus hoping that the annoying kid shot out of the cannon would miss the net, and who wondered why the cops in our neighborhood couldn’t be more like Lee Marvin from M Squad.
It was a world made for my three friends.
WE BECAME FRIENDS over a lunch.
Word spread one afternoon that three pro wrestlers—Klondike Bill, Bo Bo Brazil, and Haystack Calhoun—were eating at a Holiday Inn on 51st Street. I rushed there and found Michael, John, and Thomas standing outside, looking through the glass window that fronted the restaurant, watching the large men devour thick sandwiches and slabs of pie. I knew the guys from the school yard and the neighborhood, but had been too intimidated to approach them. The sight of the wrestlers eliminated such concerns.
“They don’t even stop to chew,” John said in wonder.
“Guys that big don’t have to chew,” Tommy told him.
“Haystack eats four steaks a night
at dinner,” I said, nudging my way past Michael for a closer look. “Every night.”
“Tell us somethin’ we don’t know,” Michael muttered, eyes on the wrestlers.
“I’m gonna go and sit with them,” I said casually. “You can come if you want.”
“You know them?” John asked.
“Not yet,” I said.
The four of us walked through the restaurant doors and approached the wrestlers’ table. The wrestlers were deep in conversation, empty plates and glasses the only remnants of their meal. They turned their heads when they saw us.
“You boys lost?” Haystack Calhoun asked. His hair and beard were shaggy and long and he was wearing bib overalls large enough to cover a banquet table. The wrestling magazine stories I had read about him put his weight at 620 pounds and I was amazed that anyone that big could slide into a booth.
“No,” I said.
“Then what do you want?” Klondike Bill asked. His hair and beard were darker and thicker than Calhoun’s and he was half his weight, which made him the second biggest man I’d ever seen.
“I’ve watched you guys wrestle a lot,” I said. I pointed a finger to the three behind me. “We all have.”
“You root for us to win?” Bo Bo Brazil asked. He was more muscular than his cohorts, and looked like sculpted stone leaning against the window, his shaved black head gleaming, his eyes clear and bright. Bo Bo’s one noted move, the head-crushing co-co-butt, was said to be a weapon harsh enough to leave an opponent paralyzed.
“No,” I said.
“Why not?” Calhoun demanded.
“You usually fight the good guys,” I said, my palms starting to sweat.
Haystack Calhoun lifted one large hand from the table and placed it on my shoulder and around my neck. Its weight alone made my legs quiver. He was breathing through his mouth, air coming out in thick gulps. “Your friends feel the same way?”
“Yes,” I said, not giving them a chance to respond. “We all root against you.”
Haystack Calhoun let out a loud laugh, the fat of his body shaking in spasms, his free hand slapping at the tabletop. Klondike Bill and Bo Bo Brazil were quick to join in.
“Get some chairs, boys,” Calhoun said, grabbing a glass of water to wash down his laugh. “Sit with us.”
We spent more than an hour in their company, crowded around the booth, treated to four pieces of cherry pie, four chocolate shakes, and tales of the wrestling world. We didn’t get the impression that they made a lot of money and, judging by their scarred faces and cauliflower ears, we knew it wasn’t an easy life. But the stories they told were filled with exuberance and the thrill of working the circuit in arenas around the country, where people paid money to jeer and cheer every night. To our young ears, being a wrestler sounded far better than running away to join the circus.
“You boys got tickets for tonight?” Haystack asked, signaling to a waitress.
“No, sir,” John said, scraping up the last crumbs of his pie.
“Get yourself over to the box office at seven,” Calhoun said, slowly squeezing out of his side of the booth. “You’ll be sittin’ ringside by seven-thirty.”
We shook hands, each of ours disappearing into the expanse of theirs and thanked them, looking up in awe as they smiled and rubbed the top of our heads.
“Don’t disappoint us now,” Klondike Bill warned on his way out. “We wanna hear you boo loud and clear tonight.”
“We won’t let you down,” Tommy said.
“We’ll throw things if you want,” John said.
We stood by the booth and watched as they walked out of the inn and onto Tenth Avenue, three large men taking small steps, heading toward Madison Square Garden and the white lights of a packed arena.
I WAS THE youngest of my friends by three years, and yet they treated me as an equal. We had so much else in common that once I was accepted, my age never became an issue. A sure sign of their acceptance was when, less than a week after we met, they gave me a nickname. They called me Shakespeare, because I was never without a book.
We were each the only child of a troubled marriage.
My father, Mario, worked as a butcher, a trade he learned in prison while serving six years of a five-to-fifteen-year sentence for second-degree manslaughter. The victim was his first wife. The battles my father fought with my mother, Raffaela, a silent, angry woman who hid herself in prayer, were neighborhood legend. My father was a con man who gambled what little he earned and managed to spend what he never had. Yet he always had time and money to buy me and my Mends ice cream cones or sodas whenever he saw us on the street. He was a man who seemed more comfortable in the company of children than in a world of adults. Growing up, for reasons I could never put into words, I was always afraid my father would disappear. That one day he would leave and not return. It was a fear fed by his separations from my mother, when I would not hear from him for weeks.
Michael, twelve, was the eldest of my Mends. His father, construction worker Devlin Sullivan, had fought in Korea and, for his trouble, earned a steel plate in his head. Always angry, Mr. Sullivan had a foul mouth and great thirst. Tall and strapping, muscular from the work, he kept his wife at a distance, living for weeks with an assortment of mistresses who soaked his money and then sent him packing. Michael’s mother, Anna, always took him back and forgave him all trespasses. Michael never spoke about his father, not in the way I always did about mine, and seemed uncomfortable the rare times I saw them together.
His parents’ marriage fed in Michael a distrust about the strong neighborhood traditions of marriage, family, and religion. He was the realist among us, suspicious of others’ intentions, never trusting the words of those he didn’t know. It was Michael who kept us grounded.
His stem exterior, though, was balanced by a strong sense of honor. He would never do anything that would embarrass us and demanded the same in return. He never played practical jokes on those he perceived as weaker and he always rose to defend anyone he believed unable to defend himself. That rigid code was reflected in the books he read and the shows he watched. The only time I ever saw him on the verge of tears was near the end of a Broadway production of Camelot, affected by Lancelot’s betrayal. His favorite of the Three Musketeers was the more troubled Aramis, and when we played games based on TV shows or movies, Michael always sought out the role of leader, whether it was Vic Morrow’s character on Combat or Eliot Ness in The Untouchables.
It was harder to make Michael laugh than the others. He was big brother and as such had to maintain a degree of maturity. He was the first among us to have a steady girlfriend, Carol Martinez, a half-Irish, half-Puerto Rican girl from 49th Street, and the last in our crew to learn to ride a bike. He was called Spots when he was younger because of the dozens of freckles that dotted his face and hands, but not often since he hated the name and the freckles had begun to fade the closer he got to puberty.
It was Michael who kept the older, explosive boys of the neighborhood at bay, often with nothing more than a look or movement That ability reinforced his position as our leader, a title he accepted but never acknowledged. It was simply his role, his place.
In the years we spent together as children, Tommy Marcano’s father was away in Attica in upstate New York, serving a seven-year sentence for an armed robbery conviction. Billy Marcano was a career criminal who kept his wife, Marie, out of his business affairs. Like most of the neighborhood mothers, Marie was devoutly religious, spending her free time helping the parish priests and nuns. During the years her husband was in prison, she remained a devoted wife, working a steady job as a telephone receptionist for an illegal betting parlor.
Tommy missed his father, writing him a letter every night before he went to bed. He carried a crumpled picture of the two of them together in his back pocket and looked at it several times a day. If Michael was the brains behind the group, Tommy was its soul. His was a gentle goodness, and he would share anything he had, never jealous of another’s gift or good for
tune. His street name was Butter, because he spread it across everything he ate and he seemed happiest when he had a fresh roll in one hand and a hot cup of chocolate in the other. He was shy and shunned any chance for attention, yet he played the dozens, a street game where the key is to out-insult your opponent.
I can never think of Tommy without a smile on his face, his eyes eager to share in the laugh, even if it came at his expense. The only time I saw a hint of sadness to him was when I was with my father, so I made an effort to include him in whatever we were planning to do together. My father, who liked to eat as much as Tommy did, usually obliged. When that happened, the smile was quick to return.
While Michael seemed older than his years, Tommy seemed far younger than eleven. He had a little boy’s affability and eagerness to please. He had a fast tongue, was swift with a comeback, and never forgot a joke. His pranks were tinged with innocence. Tommy would never want to be leader of the group, never would have been comfortable with the burden. It was more in keeping with his personality to go along, to watch, to listen, and, always, to laugh.
He also had a natural ability to build things, working away on a discarded piece of wood or an old length of pipe from which would emerge a wooden train or a makeshift flute. He never kept his creations and never took money for his work. Many of the pieces he made were mailed to his father in prison. He was never told if his father received them and he never asked.
John Reilly was raised by his mother, an attractive woman with little time to devote to anything other than church, her work as a Broadway theater usher, and her boyfriends. John’s father was a petty hood shot and killed in a foiled armored truck heist in New Jersey less than a week after his son was born. John knew nothing of the man. “There were no photos,” he once told me. “No wedding picture, no shots of him in the navy. Nobody talked about him or mentioned his name. It was as if he never existed.”