“Wild,” I replied, and went back to my Coke, shaking inside like a vibrator gone berserk.
They split, leaving me to sip my Coke.
Ben looked at me with pity. Little did he know, poor old Ben Adelstein.
I made the scene at exactly eight-thirty, cruising the block for ten minutes to insure my appearance at exactly the half-hour mark. Another of the gang kids I had seen and talked to briefly during the past week, a short fourteen-year-old everyone called Shit (chiefly because he was the errand-boy, the smallest member of the gang, a hanger-on), was waiting for me.
He was a pathetic kid, more like the pictures of Jackie Coogan as “The Kid” than anything else I could name. His nose was constantly running, there were always scrape marks and scabs on the exposed portions of his body, and he wore a dirty sailor’s hat that had been so often twisted in nervous fingers it was wrinkled and pressed almost out of its original shape. But he was apparently reliable, and so they let him remain in the gang, despite the fact that he was—simply—Shit, to them.
I wish I had a buck for every time someone banged him around, just for chuckles.
“I’se waitin’ to take you over,” he grinned at me, without realizing he was grinning. He was trying desperately to be stern and secretive about this; Secret Agent X-9 on a vital mission. But the sad little puppy-dog of him was so pleased to be able to attain any status at all, even running such a nothing errand, it worked the smile muscles of his face.
I didn’t grin back at him. That wasn’t cool, to smile back at a nowhere kid like him. “Let’s go,” I said.
We left Ben’s, and almost immediately took to the back alleys. It wasn’t really necessary, but Shit must have felt it was more mysterious to lead me five blocks away, through alleys, to a condemned building, than to walk the streets like normal people.
Alleys become a way of life, eventually.
We finally made the tenement, and dropped down through the bent-together struts of a grate that had been bolted over the mouth of the service entrance. There were four steps, now completely littered with garbage sacks half-rotted away, cat and dog offal, old cigarette packs sticky with rain moisture, anything and everything a callous urban population throws into its streets. The building had been condemned a year before, had never been pulled down, and so the jungle-like encroachment of waste and disregard of the city and its people had begun to eat at the structure. Rats nested in the building, soot and dirt bit chips from its sills and adornments, rust pitted the front door frames, windows got broken…and gang kids used it as a club house.
Walking inside the body of a metropolitan corpse.
We took the service alley to its end, and the kid knocked in a counter-intelligence manner, involved and too difficult to bother remembering. The splintered green door opened and one of the Debs stood back to let us pass.
The kid walked ahead of me, through the dusky, asphalt-floored basement. I saw a stand of filthy wash basins for laundry on one wall. Behind us, the girl slammed the door and slipped a bolt easily enough to tell me it was new, that it had been installed by the Barons. Organization.
Shit walked me through four medium-sized basement rooms without doors; apparently storage areas when the building had been inhabited. The darkness was not complete: every room had a candle in a bottle burning, casting grotesque and flickering bluish-grey shadows across the dirty asphalt floor and the walls of naked brick.
Finally, we came out into a corridor (apparently the linkage between the janitorial areas and the sub-residential sections of the building) and at the end of the passage I could see a large door, freshly painted a blood-red.
Someone had very neatly lettered
KNOCK BEFORE ENTERING
On the wooden face of the door, and below it a wise guy had scrawled, This means you! That was not the end of the quotation; the! was replaced by a curse word involving a strange juxtapositioning of the head and the anus. It didn’t do a thing for the semantics of the door.
The kid repeated his special knock, and I could hear a great deal of scuffling and moving around from within, as though the cast were preparing for the curtain to rise.
When the door opened I was staring directly into a blazing light. Somehow they had tapped a power line and were drawing juice down into the basement club rooms; the light into which I was staring was a klieg, a huge theatrical lamp with a golden gel on its face, and the damned thing was directly in my eyes.
It was like staring into the sun.
“C’mon in,” Shit urged me, pulling me by the edge of my sweater (a small dog worrying a large bone into its sanctum). I slapped his hand away, cursing at the top of my lungs, “Turn that effin’ thing off before I put a fist through it!”
The raucous, guttural jibes of a dozen voices came back at me from the golden halo surrounding the light. “Oh, wow! Tough man…real tough…stud, stud stuffin’ stud… ”
I had shielded my eyes immediately after the first blast of light had struck them, but to all intents and purposes I was stone-blind. I struggled forward into the room, and a pair of hands whirled me around. I heard the door slam and bolt behind me.
“Hey hey hey hey hey HEY!” half a dozen of them were jeering now, and I felt myself shoved from one to another. It was a harrying, a chivvying, and it was the beginning of my initiation. If I’d expected a somber, restrained adolescently-pompous ceremony, it was now a foolish expectation.
They tossed me around like a metal bearing in a pinball machine, and every time I dropped my hands from my eyes to swing on someone, I caught another, fresh blast from that damned klieg light. I had a whirling quick-thought that whatever theatrical shop they’d pilfered to get that light would never think of its being used this way.
Then I was volley-balled around the room again, and some sonofabitch took a clip at my head and stung me across the ear. I cursed like a longshoreman and swung-out. My elbow cracked into somebody’s shoulder and I heard the kid curse me as a ratbastard, and then they dribbled me a while longer.
Finally, when my legs were starting to act like someone else’s, I heard Pooch commanding. “Okay, lay off. That’s enough. C’mon, you creeps, let ‘im alone!”
I was suddenly by myself in a golden fog of blindness, and I spread my fingers slightly to see if I was still staring into the light. Who could tell? Everything was still yellow flickering coruscating golden, with a wow-wow-wow like reverberations of light.
My eyes felt burned.
But somebody maneuvered me to a seat, and I plopped down. In a few minutes I knew the effects of that light would wear off, but for now, even if they had turned it off, I was a cripple.
There was a subterranean undercurrent of voices, very much like that of an operating room, the gallery filled with young students and interns; like that of a study hall in a high school; like that of a baseball park in that fractional instant between the time the pitcher has thrown the ball and it reaches the plate. It was silence with sound.
My eyes were watering from my having squeezed them with my fingers. I could feel the sensation of sight coming back, though, and I blinked, removing my hands. The light was out; the room was lit by candles in Chianti bottles. It was a lousy effect, particularly with the sprinkled red and yellow and deep-blue and black circles that bobbed and capered in front of my eyes.
“Very funny,” I said, sarcastically, to no one in particular. There was a rising titter of laughter.
“Well, listen, goddammit, one of you smart bastards wanna step in here and laugh, I’ll kick the crap out of you!” I wasn’t acting; I was madder than hell! I would have done it.
Pooch’s voice came from the right of me, and my head swivelled at the sound. “Okay, don’t get wise, recruit!”
That one word pulled me out of my anger. It was all a part of the game, I had to remember that. I had to remember what I was in this basement to do, what I had to learn, and so I had to play their kid game, because I was a kid. I settled back, pursing my lips to stop the remarks I wanted
very much to make.
As my eyes cleared I could make out the room more clearly; oddly colorful in the fitful glare of the candles. The walls had been painted jaunty colors—or insane colors, if one looked at it from another point of view. Huge swaths of crimson, great blotches of robin’s egg blue, smears and dollops of yellow. It was a riot of completely unartistic color-forms; someone’s half-baked idea of what an artist’s pad would have for walls. Or had they merely taken turns and part-times slapping it on?
The ceiling was lost in a smoky grayness, and whatever its color, they had left it dark to make the ceiling seem lower. So low did it seem, in fact, that there was a claustrophobic tightness to the room, despite the mad mash of colors on the walls.
There were no windows. We were below street level.
Someone had bought, borrowed or liberated a rattan mat for a rug, and it stretched all across the floor of the huge room, and rolled like a window shade against the far wall. I suspected some storekeeper with a huge front window was minus a curtain.
They had retrieved items of overstuffed furniture from refuse piles left for pick-up outside the larger apartment buildings, and the room was tastelessly furnished in Period Squalor. Great spring-thrusting Morris chairs, a down-at-the-legs sofa without cushions, a sling chair that had been slung once too often. Packing crates and old orange cartons did yeoman duty where chairs and tables could not be found. One girl sat cross-legged on an ottoman, her skirt forming a tent that showed at a glance she wore no underwear. The lamps were all, strangely enough, brand new, and it ceased confusing me as I realized how easy it was to swipe a lamp from a ten cent store or furniture shop; lamps are designed for easy theft.
There was a bar, of sorts, on one corner, and I was mildly surprised to see half a dozen cases of Budweiser stacked beside it. Again, theft from beer trucks was relatively simple, in the land of the tots.
There were pictures on the walls.
Playboy is a favorite in the hung-up set. Also Man’s Hairy-Chested Adventures Magazine, able as it is to furnish four-color illustrations for stories titled, “I Was Eaten Alive By Army Ants,” or “The Killer Buffalo Gored My Guts!” It was not the first time I was to realize these kids had an unquenchable capacity for violence of the most drunken sort, nor was it the last, by any means…but it was one of the most impressive.
The room was filled. Though the entire gang was not present (and none of the juniors were allowed) there must have been at least thirty boys and half as many girls. It was a big night. It was a social function. It was my initiation night, and so ring out the sparklers and bunting.
Again Pooch spoke out over the low hum of interested watchers. He spoke like a clergyman intoning a solemn message, the way the scoutmaster spoke when you won your Eagle badge beside the campfire, the way your father spoke when he told you what girls were for. It was a serious matter, and he wasn’t fooling around.
“What is your name, recruit?”
I didn’t even think about my answers. I let my reflexes and my synapses and my gonads work for me. “Phil Beldone.”
“How old are you, recruit?”
“Seventeen.”
“You ever belonged to a rival gang or enemy club in any other turf besides this one?”
“No.”
“Are you a Jew or a nigger or a communist?”
It was easy to lie about the first, and I didn’t have to worry about the second and third. “No.”
“Do you want to become a member in good standing in the club called the Barons?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because…because I live here and I want to, uh, because I want to join a good club, that’s all.”
There was a moment’s silence. I could have given them a half hour polemic on why I wanted to join their damned club, but it was no great tactical decision to play illiterate:
When in Rome…
In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is King.
“Do you promise to uphold all the commandments and rules and regulations of this club if you are accepted?”
“Yes.”
“Will you give your life for the club or any of its brother members or Debs?”
“Uh, yes, yeah.”
“Do you recognize the authority of the President and the other officers in all things?”
I was getting impatient with all this phony ritual crap. “Sure, yeah!”
“And are you prepared to undergo the initiation all members of the Barons have to undergo?”
Oh boy, I thought, here goes my lunch…
“Yeah,” I said.
“Okay, men, he’s all yours,” Pooch said, fading back.
I turned my head in the direction he’d spoken, and there they were, big as life—and farewell to my own:
Six cats as big as houses, stripped to the gut and garrison belts wrapped around their hands. The buckles were as sharp as razors. It was pay day.
THREE
It took four guys to get my sweater and T-shirt off me. I kicked one of them squarely in the groin and another in the shin and stomped on another one’s instep, and used my free elbow in the throat of another one, and it did no good at all. The four of them stripped me to the waist, forcing me down on my knees between them, and one kid holding my neck so tightly I thought the s.o.b. would cut off my wind completely. Two of them held my arms behind me, straight out with one guy hunched over, his knee in the small of my back. I was contorted like the India rubber man, and they weren’t being particularly gentle with me, either.
Suddenly it was no longer research.
Abruptly, I was not Stanley seeking Livingstone, the dispassionate reporter, Ernie Pyle, or Hemingway, or anydamnbody but me, and I was scared witless. These weren’t kindergarten rompers playing pranks. These were teen-aged kids with more muscles than they had any right to have, bending me down like a sapling in a storm and ripping the clothes off me.
I wanted out of there.
No one will ever know how hard I wanted out of there.
I tried to yell at them, something logical and complete and round and tight like a ball bearing, something that would make them let go of my windpipe and my back (which was breaking) and let me bolt the hell out of there.
But I had said I wanted in, and that was the way it was going to be. If it killed me.
Crazy thoughts skimmed through my mind.
I won’t relate them here, they don’t count; I was half crazy with fear. Except that I really wanted out.
When they had the clothes off me, they shoved me away, and I went to my hands, as well as my knees. Instinctively I knew if I’d come this far, there were only two courses open to me. The first was to break and run and get rudely (if cadaverously) ejected from the turf; the second was to suck in my yellow streak and tough it out. I’m no braver than the next one, but six guys with belt buckles honed to razor sharpness were a pretty authoritative fighting force, and there was no telling how far they’d go. Bluff? Maybe? But there were a good many kids with scars across their faces, and their backs a tanned plane criss-crossed with white lines—scars—where the sun would never tan them. They might be knife wounds from rumbles, but on the other hand they might be belt buckle momentos.
Pooch decided for me.
“Get in line, you guys, c’mon, he’s goin’ through; get in line, willya for Chrissakes!”
They lined up, Indian gantlet style. All across the long room, about six feet apart, three on each side, alternately spaced diagonally across from each other perhaps seven feet. It was as deadly a row as I’d ever seen a guy have to hoe.
“What are you outta your goddam mind?” I yelled to Pooch. “I didn’t come down here to get my ass stripped off!”
“Either run or fold,” he said.
It was as simple as that.
I knew what I was going to do.
But I had to do it right. Just right.
“No dice. To hell with you!” I said, half turning away, as though looking for the way
out. They lowered the belts for an instant, and—
—I jumped like a scared rabbit and hit that gantlet going full blast before they knew I was coming. I got past three of them before they knew I was coming, and skimmed under a side-arm slash by the tallest kid, even as the ones I’d passed howled, “Foul!”
The fifth one was slightly smaller than the others, and he swung his big black belt in a wide S curve that I felt whistle past my back with barely an inch clearance. The sixth one was waiting, and he was grinning like Eichmann with a fresh furnace-load ready to be basted. I knew I’d never get past him. That bastard would level me with one swipe, probably open my skull or slit my throat or slice my back to the bone. I knew I’d never make it.
I ducked sidewise, broken-field style, and grabbed the fifth one, the smaller one, around the waist, before he could draw back for another swing. I carried that fink on ahead of me with the force of my rush like he was a heavy load of kindling, and I hurled him into the sixth cat with all my might.
They went bumbling together, the belt caught the fifth guy across the shoulders and he howled as though someone had rammed a poker up his backside, and I was through the gantlet, panting like a steam engine, but clear and clean.
A couple of them started after me, and I crouched down, ready to hit the first one with everything in me, if he brought that belt up…but Pooch called time.
“Cool it!” he yelled across the room. We were in the shadows, and I was all Floyd Pattersoned to roundhouse the first creep that stuck his face within range. “C’mon, knock it off you guys, he made it…”
And I had, too.
Round one of The Initiation of Cheech Beldone was over.
There was a mild demonstration, at that point, chiefly from the Debs sitting on the tables and orange crates. Doug Fairbanks had come through once more.
But I could tell I’d made a few enemies; there were kids in that group who were too chicken to fight it out in an open stand; they were the ones who had to prowl in groups, because they were afraid of getting caught alone, of laying their courage on the line. They were the ones with the deadly cruel little eyes, and the hard sets to their mouths (that became soft and white when they thought no one was watching). They got their kicks from organized brutality, and I’d robbed them of their kicks. Therefore I was a fink, and an enemy.